Otherlands : A World in the Making – A Sunday Times bestseller

FOYLES NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEARA SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLERTHE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING – HIGHLY COMMENDEDLONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTIONA 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 TimesThis 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