Otherlands
A World in the Making
Published on 2. February 2023
Book
Paperback/Softback
416 pages
978-0-14-199114-6 (ISBN)
Description
FOYLES NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR
A SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER
THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING - HIGHLY COMMENDED
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE SUNDAY TIMES, TELEGRAPH, PROSPECT, THE NEW YORKER AND BBC HISTORY
WATERSTONES NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE MONTH
'The best book on the history of life on Earth I have ever read' Tom Holland
'Epically cinematic... A book of almost unimaginable riches' Sunday Times
This is the past as we've never seen it before. Otherlands is an epic, exhilarating journey into deep time, showing us the Earth as it used to exist, and the worlds that were here before ours.
Award-winning young palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday immerses us in a series of ancient landscapes, from the mammoth steppe in Ice Age Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica, with its colonies of giant penguins, to Ediacaran Australia, where the moon is far brighter than ours today. We visit the birthplace of humanity; we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the Earth has ever known; and we watch as life emerges again after the asteroid hits, and the age of the mammal dawns.
Otherlands is a staggering imaginative feat: an emotional narrative that underscores the tenacity of life - yet also the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, including our own. To read it is to see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous and familiar.
Sunday Times bestseller, March 2023
A SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER
THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING - HIGHLY COMMENDED
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE SUNDAY TIMES, TELEGRAPH, PROSPECT, THE NEW YORKER AND BBC HISTORY
WATERSTONES NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE MONTH
'The best book on the history of life on Earth I have ever read' Tom Holland
'Epically cinematic... A book of almost unimaginable riches' Sunday Times
This is the past as we've never seen it before. Otherlands is an epic, exhilarating journey into deep time, showing us the Earth as it used to exist, and the worlds that were here before ours.
Award-winning young palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday immerses us in a series of ancient landscapes, from the mammoth steppe in Ice Age Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica, with its colonies of giant penguins, to Ediacaran Australia, where the moon is far brighter than ours today. We visit the birthplace of humanity; we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the Earth has ever known; and we watch as life emerges again after the asteroid hits, and the age of the mammal dawns.
Otherlands is a staggering imaginative feat: an emotional narrative that underscores the tenacity of life - yet also the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, including our own. To read it is to see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous and familiar.
Sunday Times bestseller, March 2023
Reviews / Votes
This book takes us through the natural history of previous forms of life in the most beguiling way. It makes you think about the past differently and it certainly makes you think about the future differently. This is a monumental work and I suspect it will be a very important book for future generations -- Ray Mears, Chair of the Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing The word "original" is really overworked. But Thomas Halliday has produced a book the like of which I have never come across -- Jeremy Paxman An extraordinary history of our almost-alien Earth... Epically cinematic... The writing is so palpably alive. A book of almost unimaginable riches. It is a book that will make its own solid and lasting contribution. It could well be the best I read in 2022 - and I know it's only January -- James McConnachie * Sunday Times * A poet among palaeontologists -- David P. Barash * Wall Street Journal * A mesmerising journey into those vast stretches of Earth's pre-history that lie behind us, on such a scale that you experience a kind of temporal vertigo just thinking about it... [Halliday is] a brilliant writer, his lyrical style vividly conjuring myriad lost worlds... It's obviously a bit of a gamble choosing one's Book of the Year in March - but there's a very good chance already that mine will be Otherlands. Stunning -- Christopher Hart * Mail on Sunday * An impressive, tightly packed, long view of the natural world. In cinematic terms, this book would be a blockbuster... Riveting scientific reading; a remarkable achievement of imagination grounded in fact -- NJ McGarrigle * Irish Times * An immersive world tour of prehistoric life... Halliday never loses sight of the bigger picture, nimbly marshalling a huge array of insights thrown up by recent research. Each chapter gives not only a vivid snapshot of an ecosystem in action but also insights into geology, climate science, evolution and biochemistry... Mind-blowing -- Neville Hawcock * Financial Times * A sweeping, lyrical biography of Earth -- the geology, the biology, the extinctions and the ever-shifting ecology that defines our living planet -- Adam Rutherford * BBC Radio 4 Start the Week * Superb... [An] epic, near-hallucinatory natural history of the living earth... Dazzling -- Simon Ings * Telegraph * Remarkable... Ingenious... A work of immense imagination [...] rooted firmly in the actual science -- Stuart Kelly * Scotsman *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
College/higher education
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 191 mm
Width: 127 mm
Thickness: 27 mm
Weight
311 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-14-199114-6 (9780141991146)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
02/2022
1st Edition
Penguin Books Ltd
€9.49
Available for download
Person
Thomas Halliday is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Earth Sciences of the University of Birmingham. His PhD won the Linnean Society's John C. Marsden Medal for the best thesis in the biological sciences in the UK, and he won the Hugh Miller Writing Competition in 2018. He is also the author of the Sunday Times bestselling Otherlands. He was raised in Rannoch in the Scottish Highlands, and now lives in London with his family.