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, 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.

©2022 Thomas Halliday (P)2022 Penguin Audio

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 :)