Underland: A Deep Time Journey

Perhaps Britain’s most hotly anticipated title of 2019, Robert Macfarlane (“the great nature writer of this generation” – Wall Street Journal) returns with a new work of nature writing that delves deep underground as he explores caves, sinkholes and catacombs, and digs into the great strata of time that has built up beneath us.

Macfarlane has previously been interviewed by Five Books about the best books on ‘wild places.’

Recommendations from our site

“Having climbed the highest heights in his debut Mountains of the Mind, Macfarlane now dives down to the lowest of the lows. He goes caving in limestone caverns deep underground, rattles through salt mines under the sea in carts and stumbles across (literal) underground subcultures in the Paris catacombs, all interwoven with learned digressions into geological epochs and classical conceptions of the underworld. What can I say? Macfarlane is the most remarkable writer.” Read more...

Editors’ Picks: Notable Books of 2019

Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor

The book, according to the author

“Underland was composed in anticipation of [a] future reader’s scrutiny. It moves over its course from the dark matter formed at the universe’s birth (studied in a time projection chamber sunk beneath the Yorkshire moors) to the nuclear-waste futures of the Anthropocene (stored in an eternity chamber sunk beneath the Bothnian Sea). Underland’s first chapter is a descent, its last is a surfacing, and during the voyage of 4.6bn years made between those two remote points – crossing landscapes from the Mendip Hills to the Slovenian highlands, the Lofoten Islands to Greenland’s ice cap, and from western Finland to a Cambridge spinney a mile from my home, where nine springs rise from the bedrock chalk. What started as a journey into pure matter became, to my surprise, an exploration of hidden human depths, both wondrous and atrocious. We all carry underlands within us, but only rarely acknowledge their existence.”

Robert Macfarlane, in The Guardian

Commentary

“Macfarlane has been on a decade-and-a-half-long journey to restore us to presence and mindfulness of place. This latest volume, extending his peerless, lyrical attention to the subterranean, is profound in every sense of the word. It changed the way that I think about the deep, hidden roots of our life on this planet.”

Richard Powers, author of The Overstory, in the New York Times