An insider's look into a very select club ... Fiennes' personal asides help to explain the unfathomable - such as how and why humans could and, more inexplicably, would persist with moving their tortured bodies across tortured landscapes in such extreme cold ... For anyone with a passion for polar exploration, this is a must read.

THE definitive book on my hero Shackleton and no one could have done it better. "The Boss" would have heartily approved of such an authentic account by one of the few men who truly knows what it's like to challenge Antarctica

Fiennes makes a fine guide on voyage into Shackleton's world . . . What makes this book so engaging is the author's own storytelling skills

With first-hand experience of polar expeditions, Fiennes relates these tales of exploration and survival, adding insight to Shackleton's journeys unlike any other biographer

An insider's look into a very select club . . . Fiennes' personal asides help to explain the unfathomable - such as how and why humans could and, more inexplicably, would persist with moving their tortured bodies across tortured landscapes in such extreme cold . . . For anyone with a passion for polar exploration, this is a must read

Fiennes brings the promised perspective of one who has been there, illuminating Shackleton's actions by comparing them with his own. Beginners to the Heroic Age will enjoy this volume, as will serious polar adventurers seeking advice. For all readers, it's a tremendous story

Praise for Ranulph Fiennes' Captain Scott

Fiennes' own experiences certainly allow him to write vividly and with empathy of the hell that the men went through.

A valuable corrective to the trend of Scott debunking...One by one, and with the commendable attention to detail, Fiennes explodes the accumulated myths.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes has done Captain Scott's memory some service...he has certainly written a more dispassionate and balanced account than Huntford ever set out to do.

Full of awe-inspiring details of hardship, resolve and weather that defies belief, told by someone of unique authority. No one is more tailor-made to tell [this] story than Sir Ranulph Fiennes

Vividly realized... Gorgeously rendered...A story full of subtle surprises...This is a stunner

Poetic...A lovely, gripping tale about a world that could be our own

Once There Were Wolves is one of those very rare, special novels that changes you as you read, which you do as slowly as you can because you want to savor it, except the pages keep turning furiously because the story is so thrilling and so powerful. It's beautifully written and smart and impressively, importantly atmospheric. And it's also funny and warm and perfectly crafted with some of the best characters I have ever read. I will be enthusiastically recommending this novel to everyone forever. Charlotte McConaghy has cemented herself as a sure-thing, must-read writer for me. I loved loved loved this book

[A] propulsive novel.

Vivid... An intricate analysis of our planet's interconnected past, it is impossible to come away from Otherlands without awe for what may lie ahead

Halliday takes us on a journey into deep time in this epic book, showing us Earth as it used to be and the worlds that were here before ours

This is a piece of nature writing that covers millions of years, from the very start of evolution, while capturing the almost unthinkable ways geography has shifted and changed over time. Epic in scope and executed with charming enthusiasm, Otherlands looks set to be a big talking point for fans of non-fiction in 2022

Palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday embraces a yet more epic timescale in Otherlands: A World in the Making, touring the many living worlds that preceded ours, from the mammoth steppe in glaciated Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica. If you have ever wondered what sound a pterosaur's wings made in flight, this is the book for you

Full of wonder and fascination, exquisitely written, this is time travel of spectacular dimensions - a journey into our planet's evolution and the world in which we live. A compellingly important read

The best book on the history of life on Earth I have ever read

Thomas Halliday's debut is a kaleidoscopic and evocative journey into deep time. He takes quiet fossil records and complex scientific research and brings them alive - riotous, full-coloured and three-dimensional. You'll find yourself next to giant two-metre penguins in a forested Antarctica 41 million years ago or hearing singing icebergs in South Africa some 444 million years ago. Maybe most importantly, Otherlands is a timely reminder of our planet's impermanence and what we can learn from the past

Deep time is very hard to capture - even to imagine - and yet Thomas Halliday has done so in this fascinating volume. He wears his grasp of vast scientific learning lightly; this is as close to time travel as you are likely to get

An absolutely gripping adventure story, exploring back through the changing vistas of our own planet's past. Earth has been many different worlds over its planetary history, and Thomas Halliday is the perfect tour guide to these past landscapes, and the extraordinary creatures that inhabited them. Otherlands is science writing at its very finest

Otherlands is one of those rare books that's both deeply informative and daringly imaginative. It will change the way you look at the history of life, and perhaps also its future

This stunning biography of our venerable Earth, detailing her many ages and moods, is an essential travel guide to the changing landscapes of our living world. As we hurtle into the Anthropocene, blindly at the helm of this inconstant planet, Halliday gives us our bearings within the panorama of deep time. Aeons buckle under his pen: the world before us made vivid; the paradox of our permanence and impermanence visceral. Wonderful

Stirring, surprising and beautifully written, Otherlands offers glimpses of times so different to our own they feel like parallel worlds. In its lyricism and the intimate attention it pays to nonhuman life, Thomas Halliday's book recalls Rachel Carson's Under the Sea Wind, and marks the arrival of an exciting new voice

Imaginative

This study of our prehistoric earth is "beyond cinematic", James McConnachie says. "It could well be the best book I read in 2022

It's phenomenally difficult for human brains to grasp deep time. Even thousands of years seem unfathomable, with all human existence before the invention of writing deemed 'prehistory', a time we know very little about. Thomas Halliday's book Otherlands helps to ease our self-centred minds into these depths. Moving backwards in time, starting with the thawing plains of the Pleistocene (2.58 million - 12,000 years ago) and ending up in the marine world of the Ediacaran (635-541 mya), he devotes one chapter to each of the intervening epochs or periods and, like a thrilling nature documentary, presents a snapshot of life at that time. It's an immersive experience, told in the present tense, of these bizarre 'otherlands', populated by creatures and greenery unlike any on Earth today

Each chapter of this literary time machine takes us further back in prehistory, telling vivid stories about ancient creatures and their alien ecologies, ending 550 million years ago

The largest-known asteroid impact on Earth is the one that killed the dinosaurs 65?million years ago, but that is a mere pit stop on Thomas Halliday's evocative journey into planetary history in Otherlands. Each chapter of this literary time machine takes us further back into the deep past, telling vivid stories about ancient creatures and their alien ecologies, until at last we arrive 550?million years ago in the desert of what is now Australia, where no plant life yet covers the land. Halliday notes the urgency of reducing carbon emissions in the present to protect our settled patterns of life, but adds: "The idea of a pristine Earth, unaffected by human biology and culture, is impossible." It's an epic lesson in the impermanence of all things

The world on which we live is "undoubtedly a human planet", Thomas Halliday writes in this extraordinary debut. But "it has not always been, and perhaps will not always be". Humanity has dominated the Earth for a tiny fraction of its history. And that History is vast. We tend to lump all dinosaurs, for example, into one period in the distant past. But more time passed between the last diplodocus and the first tyrannosaurus than has passed between the last tyrannosaurus and the present day. A mind-boggling fact. This is a glorious, mesmerising guide to the past 500 million years bought to life by this young palaeobiologist's rich and cinematic writing

A book that I really want to read but haven't yet bought - so I hope it goes into my Christmas stocking - is Otherlands: A World in the Making by Thomas Halliday. It sounds so amazing - a history of the world before history, before people. He's trying to write the history of the organisms and the plants and the creatures and everything else as the world grows from protozoic slime or whatever we emerged from. It sounds like an absolutely incredible effort of imagination. I think that Christmas presents should be books you can curl up with and get engrossed in and transported by - and Otherlands sounds like exactly that

But, of course, not all history is human history, Otherlands, by Thomas Halliday, casts its readers further and further back, past the mammoths, past the dinosaurs, back to an alien world of shifting rock and weird plants. It is a marvel