Otherlands

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 WritingThe word “original” is really overworked. But Thomas Halliday has produced a book the like of which I have never come across – Jeremy PaxmanAn 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 *

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.