a brilliant, thrilling, terrifying work of literature, making me want to think more adventurously and live more deeply.

All Macfarlane’s books are urgings to take a closer look at the environment we live in, and at the natural world especially. They are perception-shifters. And with its darker, delving subject matter counter-weighing its lyricism, Underland is a magnificent feat of writing, travelling and thinking that feels genuinely frontier-pushing, unsettling and exploratory

Robert Macfarlane is a magician with words. In Underland he shows us how to see in the dark. His writing is like a vortex… Once caught, you’re pulled deeper and deeper with each page

Devastating, lyrical, blazingly vivid… An examination of the darknesses invisible beneath our feet. The book’s great power comes from Macfarlane’s deliberate turn away from despair and toward a deliberate, loving, and luminous sense of awe

Robert Macfarlane’s writing reminds us of the astonishing variety of things you can see when you go at walking speed, and of how strange and rich the world is

The great nature writer, and nature poet, of this generation

Exquisite. [Robert Macfarlane] evokes so vividly places to which I and probably you will never go, and at the eeriness of the places themselves and the sense of vast scale they restore to us at a time when it can feel like the world has shrunken around us

An epic descent into a series of underground and underwater landscapes

Beautifully written and wise, this haunting book is a treasure… It reads like a seamless dive, crawl, and trek through deep time, in sense-rich landscapes, accompanied by fascinating views of the human saga. Its unique spell is irresistible

Beautifully and bravely balanced… This is a radical book in every sense. It goes as deep as it can, unafraid of the risk that what it finds will turn everything on its head