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Cover of Underland by Robert Macfarlane

Underland

  • 496 pages · about 8 hours
  • First published 2019
  • 16 editions

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1 About this book

Underland: A Deep Time Journey is a book by Robert Macfarlane and the sequel to The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. Initially published in English on 2 May 2019 by Hamish Hamilton in the UK and on 4 June 2019 by W. W. Norton & Company in the US, the book has been translated into over a dozen languages. An audiobook, read by Matthew Waterson, was also released in June 2019 by HighBridge Audio.

The book is a descriptive journey by the author of different subterranean landscapes that he explores, including caving in the Mendip Hills, the Catacombs of Paris, the Karst Plateau, an underground laboratory for detecting evidence of dark matter, and descending into a glacier's moulin among other explorations. These underground spaces represent "burial and unburial and deep time." Through these underground journeys the book sheds light on the impacts and consequences of human actions within the Anthropocene geological epoch.

Summary adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Good for readers who want: history and a long read.

  • Voyages and travels
  • Human ecology
  • Nature, effect of human beings on
  • History
  • Civilization
  • Underground areas
  • Landscapes
  • Geology

2 About Robert Macfarlane

Born 1976

Robert Macfarlane (born 15 August 1976) is a British non-fiction writer, and a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Macfarlane is best known for his books on landscape, nature, place, people and language, which include The Old Ways (2012), Landmarks (2015), The Lost Words (2017), Underland (2019) and Is a River Alive? (2025), and for his many collaborations with musicians, composers and artists.

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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