Underland

a brilliant, thrilling, terrifying work of literature, making me want to think more adventurously and live more deeply. * Amy Liptrot *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 * Evening Standard *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 – Andrea Wulf, best-selling author of ‘The Invention of Nature’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 – Lauren GroffRobert 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 – Philip PullmanThe great nature writer, and nature poet, of this generation * Wall Street Journal *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 – Rebecca SolnitAn epic descent into a series of underground and underwater landscapes * Financial Times *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 – Diane AckermanBeautifully 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 * The Oldie *

Robert Macfarlane is internationally renowned for his writing on nature, people and place. His bestselling books include 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, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe. He has collaborated closely with artists including Olafur Eliasson and Stanley Donwood, 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. As a lyricist and performer, he has written albums and songs with musicians including Cosmo Sheldrake, Karine Polwart and Johnny Flynn, with whom he has released two albums, Lost In The Cedar Wood (2021) and The Moon Also Rises (2023). In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E.M. Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2022 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 currently completing his third book with Jackie Morris- The Lost Birds.