Robert Macfarlane and Rebecca Solnit - Underland

Hailed as “the great nature writer of this generation” (Wall Street Journal), Robert Macfarlane is the celebrated author of prize-winning books about the intersection between the human and the natural world.

In Underland: A Deep Time Journey, he delivers his masterwork: an epic exploration of Earth’s vast subterranean landscape in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself.

Delving into what is known as “deep time,” the dizzying expanses of geologic time that stretch away from the present, Macfarlane takes us on an exhilarating journey to Arctic sea caves, Bronze Age burial chambers, the catacombs of Paris, the underground fungal networks through which trees communicate, a dark matter research lab searching for the origins of the universe, and a deep-sunk “hiding place” designed to store nuclear waste for 100,000 years to come.

Global in its geography, contemporary in its concerns, and written with great lyricism and power, Underland uncovers our complex, crucial relationship with the worlds beneath our feet.

Robert Macfarlane is the author of the prize-winning books Mountains of the Mind, Wild Places, and The Old Ways. He has contributed to Harper’s, Granta, The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including a trilogy of atlases and the books The Mother of All Questions, Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me; The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award).