An astonishing debut . . . The effect is transcendent . . . an exquisite and indefinable hybrid that is far greater than the sum of its parts . . . At a time when humanity is destroying natural abundance and failing to understand its own diversity, a book like Imbler's is a valuable gift

Imbler is [...] a gifted science and nature writer, capable of describing sea creatures with knowledge, originality and supple poeticism

Imbler, a science journalist, shines a light on some of the ocean's most delightful and overlooked creatures... the author draws connections between these fascinating animals and our own needs and desires - for safety, family and more

Imbler pulls off an impressive feat: a book about the majestic, bewildering undersea world that also happens to be deeply human

Imbler is a terrific talent... with brutal candor and elegant metaphor, [My Life in Sea Creatures] reveals the gap between where we are today and a truly inclusive and connected world

By way of an exploration of the diverse wonders of marine biology, Imbler reconstructs with raw openness the intensity of their experiences of being a teenager, of coming out, and of gender and racial prejudice

A singular memoir revealing what we can learn about empathy from odd beasties living in hostile environments

A lyrical consideration of alternative models of survival

This is a miraculous, transcendental book... To write with such grace, skill, and wisdom would be impressive enough; to have done so in their first major work is truly breathtaking. Sabrina Imbler is a generational talent, and this book is a gift to us all

How do we place our selves in the natural world? What are the costs and gains of our attachment to it? Where would you put Sabrina Imbler's astounding book on the shelf? In a separate section, marked: Awe and Wonder

Profound, surprising, and thrillingly strange. I love it

It's a marvel...To find the conundrums of human sexuality and identity reflected back at you by a jellyfish is nothing short of a revelation. Reading this book was an entrancing, provocative, unforgettable experience

My Life in Sea Creatures is an ingenious book that shows, with a glittering skill, how the precious life around us enriches our world and our ways of living. This is nature writing with an open and daring heart

I loved this. A double helix of queer memoir and marine biology that twists together beautifully

[This book] marks the arrival of a phenomenal writer creating an intellectual channel entirely their own, within which whales and feral goldfish swim by the enchantment, ache, and ecstasy of human life

A delicious balance of the zoological and the personal. Imbler manages to gaze both inward to the self and outward to the strange selves of the creatures in the world's waters

Sabrina Imbler writes with incredible curiosity, compassion, and wit. This is a book that asks us to care not simply for one another, but for creatures far distant from us-for the sea, the land, and the worlds we make together

Compelling, distinctive and enthralling, Sabrina Imbler has found a whole new way to help us think about and care about the deep and interweaving curiosities of human life and sea life

This book made my heart grow like a feral goldfish. Reading it was a journey into my rapidly expanding self. It made me feel limitless and accompanied. I'm deeply grateful to Sabrina Imbler for writing it

Imbler's ability to balance illuminating science journalism with candid personal revelation is impressive, and the mesmerizing glints of lyricism are a treat. This intimate deep dive will leave readers eager to see where Imbler goes next

[My Life in Sea Creatures] feels like a quiet tidal change in books for our community and beyond... Sabrina's bioluminescent prose stuns

A superb must-read... [a] collection of fascinating essays [which] explores the wonders of rivers and oceans in the light of the writer's own life

Compulsively readable, beautifully lyric, and wildly tender... A breathtaking, mesmerizing debut from a tremendous talent

A pinwheel of awe spinning one 'wow' after another

Working at the nexus of nature writing and memoir, Sabrina Imbler is beautifully reinventing both genres

[It] is a creature unlike any other-one that grips you with its tentacles and pulls you down into new depths. It is impossible to read this book and not be transformed

[This} is a bright, shimmering gift of a book that deftly glides and weaves, exploring sea life and the self with boundless curiosity, tenderness, and wisdom... Every essay in this brilliant debut collection deserves to be treasured

[This book] is an incandescent and provocative exploration of worlds we often do not see, rendered with the utmost tenderness and care... providing a new framework that will forever change how we understand the world around us

Imbler blends personal history with the most fascinating writing on sea creatures living in remote and deep areas of the ocean. Metaphors abound around family, community, queerness, and survival; this book is another jewel in the crown of Imbler's incredible work

Sabrina Imbler's latest book mingles memoir and marine biology in a tender, lucid look at the author's life refracted through the deep sea. Their essays' mesmerizing descriptions of the often mysterious lives of aquatic animals also serve as portals of inquiry into Imbler's life on land

Imbler, a science journalist, shines a light on some of the ocean's most delightful and overlooked creatures...Along the way, the author draws connections between these fascinating animals and our own needs and desires - for safety, family and more

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