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FOYLES NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR A SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN
BESTSELLER THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING - HIGHLY
COMMENDED LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION
A 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 Times This 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.
What would it be like to experience the ancient landscapes of the
past as we experience the reality of nature today? To actually
visit the Jurassic or Cambrian worlds, to wander among their
spectacular flora and fauna, to witness their continental shifts?
In Otherlands, the multi-talented palaeontologist Thomas Halliday
gives us a breath-taking up close encounter with worlds that are
normally unimaginably distant. Journeying backwards in time from
the most recent Ice Age to the dawn of complex life itself, and
across all seven continents, Halliday immerses us in sixteen lost
ecosystems, each one rendered with a novelist's eye for detail and
drama. Every description - whether the colour of a beetle's shell,
the shambling rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell
of sulphur in the air - is grounded in fact. We visit the
birthplace of humanity on the shores of the great lake Lonyumun, in
Pliocene-era Kenya; in the Miocene, we hear the crashing of the
highest waterfall the world has ever known as it fills the
evaporated Mediterranean Sea; we encounter forests of giant fungus
nine metres tall in Devonian-era Scotland; and we gaze at the light
of a full and enormous moon in the Ediacaran sky, when life hasn't
yet reached land. To read Otherlands is to time travel, to see the
last 550 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable
time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fantastical and
familiar.
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