Underland: A Deep Time Journey

The Sunday Times bestselling tour-de-force from the author of The Lost Words and The Old Ways - an unmissable journey into the hidden worlds beneath our feet 'Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save...' From the vast underground mycelial networks by which trees communicate to the ice-blue depths of glacial moulins, and from North Yorkshire to the Lofoten Islands, Robert Macfarlane traces a voyage through the worlds beneath our feet. He reaches back into the deep history of the planet, through the layers of rock and ancient buried objects, and forward to the future, the legacy of the anthropocene and the world we bequeath our descendants. Underland is Macfarlane at his dazzling best - the lyrical, the political and the philosophical come together in this profound exploration of the relationship between landscape and the human heart.

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.

Review :
a brilliant, thrilling, terrifying work of literature, making me want to think more adventurously and live more deeply. All Macfarlane's books are urgings to take a closer look at the environment we live in, and at the natural world especially. They are perception-shifters. And with its darker, delving subject matter counter-weighing its lyricism, Underland is a magnificent feat of writing, travelling and thinking that feels genuinely frontier-pushing, unsettling and exploratory Robert Macfarlane is a magician with words. In Underland he shows us how to see in the dark. His writing is like a vortex... Once caught, you're pulled deeper and deeper with each page Devastating, lyrical, blazingly vivid... An examination of the darknesses invisible beneath our feet. The book's great power comes from Macfarlane's deliberate turn away from despair and toward a deliberate, loving, and luminous sense of awe Robert Macfarlane's writing reminds us of the astonishing variety of things you can see when you go at walking speed, and of how strange and rich the world is The great nature writer, and nature poet, of this generation Exquisite. [Robert Macfarlane] evokes so vividly places to which I and probably you will never go, and at the eeriness of the places themselves and the sense of vast scale they restore to us at a time when it can feel like the world has shrunken around us An epic descent into a series of underground and underwater landscapes Beautifully written and wise, this haunting book is a treasure... It reads like a seamless dive, crawl, and trek through deep time, in sense-rich landscapes, accompanied by fascinating views of the human saga. Its unique spell is irresistible Beautifully and bravely balanced... This is a radical book in every sense. It goes as deep as it can, unafraid of the risk that what it finds will turn everything on its head