Entangled Life

Entangled Life

How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures

Summary

The smash-hit Sunday Times bestseller that will transform your understanding of our planet and life itself.

'Astonishing ... it seems somehow to tip the natural world upside down' Observer

'Completely mind-blowing ... reads like an adventure story' Sunday Times

*WINNER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY BOOK PRIZE 2021*
*WINNER OF THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR CONSERVATION WRITING 2021*

The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them. They can change our minds, heal our bodies and even help us avoid environmental disaster; they are metabolic masters, earth-makers and key players in most of nature's processes. In Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake takes us on a mind-altering journey into their spectacular world, and reveals how these extraordinary organisms transform our understanding of our planet and life itself.

'Dazzling, vibrant, vision-changing' Robert Macfarlane
'Urgent, astounding and necessary' Helen Macdonald
'Gorgeous!' Margaret Atwood (on Twitter)
'Wonderful' Nigella Lawson
'This book is like one surprise after another' David Byrne
'Uplifting' Jeanette Winterson

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2021*
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021*

* A Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, The Times, Evening Standard, Mail on Sunday, BBC Science Focus and Time Book of the Year *

Reviews

  • After this book, nothing will seem the same again . . . beautifully written and illustrated . . . dazzling . . . reveals a world that's both more extraordinary and more delicate than could be imagined
    Mail on Sunday

About the author

Merlin Sheldrake

Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and a writer. He received a Ph.D. in Tropical Ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He is a research associate of the Vrije University, Amsterdam, and sits on the advisory board of the Fungi Foundation and the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks.

Entangled Life is an international bestseller, winner of the Royal Society Science Book Prize 2021 and the Wainwright Prize 2021, and has been nominated for a host of other prizes, including the British Book Awards Book of the Year 2021 for Narrative Non-Fiction and the Rathbones Folio Prize 2021. Entangled Life was also featured as Radio 4's Book of the Week and selected as a Book of the Year in The Times, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times, New Statesman and Time, among others. It has been translated into twenty languages.
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