Discover the past as you’ve never seen it before in Otherlands
Otherlands is an epic, exhilarating journey into deep time. Travelling back in time to the dawn of complex life, and across all seven continents, award-winning young palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday gives us a mesmerizing up close encounter with eras that are normally unimaginably distant.
There are lots of digital resources that you can use to enter the display competition from Penguin Press. You can download the pack here.
To celebrate this remarkable non-fiction debut, libraries are invited to take part in a display competition. The best library display will win £100 worth of plants (courtesy of our partners Leaf Envy) to furnish their library spaces and homes. Displays should be tagged #Otherlands and tagging PenguinUKBooks and readingagency on social media.
A message from the author:
‘Past life on this planet is not just individual skeletons, but entire, thriving landscapes, as varied as the deserts, reefs, and forests of today. Otherlands immerses you, the reader, in sixteen of these landscapes from the last 550 million years. It takes you from the dunes of Ice Age Alaska, where mammoth and horses rub shoulders with lions and bears, back to the shallow seas of Ediacara in South Australia, where some of the earliest complex ecosystems are emerging.
Along the way, there are spectacular sights, from the highest waterfall that ever lived, to the two metre penguins of the Antarctic rainforest. Every place is brought to life in its entirety, from sky to soil, plants, fungi, animals, and chemistry, using the latest evidence from geology, evolutionary biology, palaeontology, and genetics to produce a vivid portrait of life as it once was, and what that might mean for life in the short- and long-term future.
I’m very excited to see it out in the real world, and hope that you are too. Understanding the past of this planet has never been more important, and I want to thank all the libraries who are giving people the chance to think about the world around them from the mindset of deep time.’ Thomas Halliday, author of Otherlands
Advance praise for Otherlands:
‘The best book on the history of life on Earth I have ever read’ Tom Holland
‘A compellingly important read’ Isabella Tree
