Otherlands

Otherlands

A World in the Making - A Sunday Times bestseller

Summary

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

Reviews

  • This book takes us through the natural history of previous forms of life in the most beguiling way. It makes you think about the past differently and it certainly makes you think about the future differently. This is a monumental work and I suspect it will be a very important book for future generations
    Ray Mears, Chair of the Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing

About the author

Thomas Halliday

Thomas Halliday is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Earth Sciences of the University of Birmingham. His PhD won the Linnean Society's John C. Marsden Medal for the best thesis in the biological sciences in the UK, and he won the Hugh Miller Writing Competition in 2018. He is also the author of the Sunday Times bestselling Otherlands. He was raised in Rannoch in the Scottish Highlands, and now lives in London with his family.
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