a brilliant, thrilling, terrifying work of literature, making me want to think more adventurously and live more deeply.
Amy Liptrot
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
Evening Standard
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
Andrea Wulf, best-selling author of 'The Invention of Nature' 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
Lauren Groff 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
Philip Pullman The great nature writer, and nature poet, of this generation
Wall Street Journal
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
Rebecca Solnit An epic descent into a series of underground and underwater landscapes
Financial Times
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
Diane Ackerman 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
The Oldie
Thrilling and soulful, raw and erudite. Robert Macfarlane writes of his astonishing subterranean explorations with wondrous, indelible power... Underland is a profound reckoning with humankind's self-imperiled position in nature's eternal order. It is a book of revelations
Philip Gourevitch Robert Macfarlane has long provided us with some of the most distinctive and sensitive thinking about how humans understand and experience the terrestrial world. Underland [is] his most urgent, universal, and expansive book yet
Francisco Cantu What a total delight. Once again, so many enlivening encounters along paths less frequently trod. Macfarlane remains our perfect guide, reminding us there's so much in the world to wonder at
Benedict Allen Eye-opening, lyrical and moving...capturing the poetry beneath the science.
Publisher's Weekly
Underland is a startling and memorable book, charting invisible and vanishing worlds. Macfarlane has made himself Orpheus, the poet who ventures down to the darkest depths and returns - frighteningly alone-to sing of what he has seen
New Statesman
You'd be crazy not to read this book
The Sunday Times
Marvellous... Neverending curiosity, generosity of spirit, erudition, bravery and clarity... This is a book well worth reading
The Times
Extraordinary... at once learned and readable, thrilling and beautifully written
Observer