Otherlands

A World in the Making

By: Thomas Halliday

Narrated by: Adetomiwa Edun

Brought to you by Penguin.

A dazzlingly original, lyrical and epic encounter with the Earth as it used to be

What would it be like to visit the ancient landscapes of the past? To experience the Jurassic or Cambrian worlds, to wander among these other lands, as creatures extinct for millions of years roam? In this mesmerizing debut, the award-winning 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 a series of extinct ecosystems, each one rendered with a novelist's eye for detail and drama. Yet every description - whether the colour of a beetle's shell, the rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air - is grounded in fact. We visit the birthplace of humanity in Pliocene-era Kenya; in the Jurassic, we wander among dinosaur-inhabited islands in the Mediterranean; and we gaze at the light of an enormous moon in the Ediacaran sky, when life hasn't yet reached land.

Otherlands is a naturalist's travel guide, albeit one of lands distant in time rather than space, showing us the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fantastical and familiar.

© Thomas Halliday 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Critic reviews

This book takes us through the natural history of previous forms of life in the most beguiling way. It makes you think about the past differently and it certainly makes you think about the future differently. This is a monumental work and I suspect it will be a very important book for future generations (Ray Mears, Chair of the Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing)

The word "original" is really overworked. But Thomas Halliday has produced a book the like of which I have never come across (Jeremy Paxman)

An extraordinary history of our almost-alien Earth... Epically cinematic... The writing is so palpably alive. A book of almost unimaginable riches. It is a book that will make its own solid and lasting contribution. It could well be the best I read in 2022 - and I know it's only January (James McConnachie)

A poet among palaeontologists (David P. Barash)

A mesmerising journey into those vast stretches of Earth's pre-history that lie behind us, on such a scale that you experience a kind of temporal vertigo just thinking about it... [Halliday is] a brilliant writer, his lyrical style vividly conjuring myriad lost worlds... It's obviously a bit of a gamble choosing one's Book of the Year in March - but there's a very good chance already that mine will be Otherlands. Stunning (Christopher Hart)

An impressive, tightly packed, long view of the natural world. In cinematic terms, this book would be a blockbuster... Riveting scientific reading; a remarkable achievement of imagination grounded in fact (NJ McGarrigle)

An immersive world tour of prehistoric life... Halliday never loses sight of the bigger picture, nimbly marshalling a huge array of insights thrown up by recent research. Each chapter gives not only a vivid snapshot of an ecosystem in action but also insights into geology, climate science, evolution and biochemistry... Mind-blowing (Neville Hawcock)

A sweeping, lyrical biography of Earth -- the geology, the biology, the extinctions and the ever-shifting ecology that defines our living planet (Adam Rutherford)

Superb... [An] epic, near-hallucinatory natural history of the living earth... Dazzling (Simon Ings)

Remarkable... Ingenious... A work of immense imagination [...] rooted firmly in the actual science (Stuart Kelly)

Why write it backwards???

Kind of annoying that it goes in reverse chronological order, feels wrong and I found I could never “get into it” because it is “going backwards”!
Otherwise it was well written, would love to have the option to rearrange the chapters, or read an alternate version, in order :)