Underland: A Deep Time Journey
About this ebook
A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
WINNER OF THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2019
WINNER OF THE STANFORD DOLMAN TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2020
'You'd be crazy not to read this book' The Sunday Times
A Guardian Best Book of the 21st Century
In Underland, Robert Macfarlane takes us on a journey into the worlds beneath our feet. From the ice-blue depths of Greenland's glaciers, to the underground networks by which trees communicate, from Bronze Age burial chambers to the rock art of remote Arctic sea-caves, this is a deep-time voyage into the planet's past and future. Global in its geography, gripping in its voice and haunting in its implications, Underland is a work of huge range and power, and a remarkable new chapter in Macfarlane's long-term exploration of landscape and the human heart.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE 2020
'Macfarlane has invented a new kind of book, really a new genre entirely' The Irish Times
'He is the great nature writer, and nature poet, of this generation' Wall Street Journal
'Macfarlane has shown how utterly beautiful a brilliantly written travel book can still be' Observer on The Old Ways
'Irradiated by a profound sense of wonder... Few books give such a sense of enchantment; it is a book to give to many, and to return to repeatedly' Independent on Landmarks
'It sets the imagination tingling...like reading a prose Odyssey sprinkled with imagist poems' The Sunday Times on The Old Ways
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About the author
Robert Macfarlane's Sunday Times- and New York Times-bestselling books include Is a River Alive?, Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind, as well as a book-length prose-poem, Ness. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, won prizes around the world, and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio and dance. He has also written operas, plays, albums, choral works, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe.
Macfarlane has collaborated closely with artists including Olafur Eliasson, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally bestselling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E.M. Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2023 in Toronto he was the inaugural winner of the Weston International Award for a body of work in the field of non-fiction. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is presently working on a graphic novel re-telling of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Macfarlane and Morris's latest project, The Book of Birds, will be published in May 2026.
