Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing Prize 2022
Travelling back in time to the dawn of life, and across all seven continents, palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday provides a close encounter with eras that are unimaginably distant.
In Otherlands he takes the reader to a series of ancient landscapes, from the mammoth steppe in Ice Age Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica to Ediacaran Australia, where the moon is far brighter than ours today. We hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the Earth has ever known and watch as life emerges again after the asteroid hits and the age of the mammal dawns. These lost worlds seem fantastical, yet every description is grounded in the fossil record.
‘The best book on the history of life on Earth I have ever read’ Tom Halliday
‘Epically cinematic . . . A book of almost unimaginable riches’ Sunday Times
