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(as of Jun 02, 2024 23:14:25 UTC – Details)
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
From the Publisher
‘The worlds of the past can sometimes seem unimaginably distant. Those worlds, those other lands, can never be visited – at least not in the physical sense. You can never visit the environments through which titanic dinosaurs strode, never walk on their soil nor swim in their water. The only way to experience them is rockwise, to read the imprints in the frozen sand and to imagine a disappeared Earth. This book is an exploration of the Earth as it used to exist, the changes that have occurred during its history, and the ways that life has found to adapt, or not.
To consider the landscapes that once existed is to feel the draw of a temporal wanderlust. My hope is that you will read this in the vein of a naturalist’s travel book, albeit one of lands distant in time rather than space, and begin to see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous yet familiar.’
Thomas Halliday
ASIN : B096TDJKJH
Publisher : Penguin (1 Feb. 2022)
Language : English
File size : 16997 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
Print length : 388 pages