Otherlands

A World in the Making

Author: Thomas Halliday

Paperback

A dazzlingly original, lyrical and epic encounter with the Earth as it used to be

Otherlands by Author Thomas Halliday is immersive and thought-provoking exploration of parallel universes and the consequences of our choices. With a captivating blend of science fiction and philosophy, Halliday takes readers on a mind-bending journey through different realities, prompting them to question their own beliefs and values in a way that will stay with them long after they finish reading.

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Summary

A dazzlingly original, lyrical and epic encounter with the Earth as it used to be

Description

A dazzlingly original, lyrical and epic encounter with the Earth as it used to beThis 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. Travelling back in time to the dawn of complex life, and across all seven continents, award-winning young palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday gives us a mesmerizing up close encounter with eras that are normally unimaginably distant.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. These lost worlds seem fantastical and yet every description - whether the colour of a beetle's shell, the rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air - is grounded in the fossil record.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.

Critic Reviews

“Deep time is very hard to capture - even to imagine - and yet Thomas Halliday has done so in this fascinating volume. He wears his grasp of vast scientific learning lightly; this is as close to time travel as you are likely to get”

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
The word "original" is really overworked. But Thomas Halliday has produced a book the like of which I have never come across -- Jeremy Paxman
An extraordinary history of our almost-alien Earth... Epically cinematic... The writing is so palpably alive. A book of almost unimaginable riches. It is a book that will make its own solid and lasting contribution. It could well be the best I read in 2022 - and I know it's only January -- James McConnachie Sunday Times
A poet among palaeontologists -- David P. Barash Wall Street Journal
A mesmerising journey into those vast stretches of Earth's pre-history that lie behind us, on such a scale that you experience a kind of temporal vertigo just thinking about it... [Halliday is] a brilliant writer, his lyrical style vividly conjuring myriad lost worlds... It's obviously a bit of a gamble choosing one's Book of the Year in March - but there's a very good chance already that mine will be Otherlands. Stunning -- Christopher Hart Mail on Sunday
An impressive, tightly packed, long view of the natural world. In cinematic terms, this book would be a blockbuster... Riveting scientific reading; a remarkable achievement of imagination grounded in fact -- NJ McGarrigle Irish Times
An immersive world tour of prehistoric life... Halliday never loses sight of the bigger picture, nimbly marshalling a huge array of insights thrown up by recent research. Each chapter gives not only a vivid snapshot of an ecosystem in action but also insights into geology, climate science, evolution and biochemistry... Mind-blowing -- Neville Hawcock Financial Times
A sweeping, lyrical biography of Earth -- the geology, the biology, the extinctions and the ever-shifting ecology that defines our living planet -- Adam Rutherford BBC Radio 4 Start the Week
Superb... [An] epic, near-hallucinatory natural history of the living earth... Dazzling -- Simon Ings Telegraph
Remarkable... Ingenious... A work of immense imagination [...] rooted firmly in the actual science -- Stuart Kelly Scotsman

About the Author

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.

Product Details

Publisher

Penguin Books Ltd

Published

2nd February 2023

Pages

416

ISBN

9780141991146

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Otherlands

A World in the Making

Author: Thomas Halliday

Paperback

Paperback

PRODUCT INFORMATION

Summary

Description

Critic Reviews

About the Author

Product Details

Returns

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