Stories about subterranean mysteries have fascinated me since I was small, beginning with Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth (not forgetting the cheesy film version from 1959, with James Mason and—yes!—Pat Boone), and the Pellucidar novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, with their fabulously garish covers depicting the winged, fanged, and taloned creatures to be found “down there.” Robert Macfarlane’s Underland (Hamish Hamilton) rekindles that half-forgotten fascination, with Macfarlane acting as a contemporary Orpheus, guiding us on an eclectic series of expeditions into the underworld. The range of these expeditions is broad, both geographically and thematically; to quote from the front flap: “We move from the origins of the universe to a post-human Earth, passing along the way through Bronze Age burial chambers, the catacombs of Paris, Greenland’s melting glaciers, starless rivers and Arctic sea caves, the underground fungal networks through which trees communicate, and a deep-sunk ‘hiding place’ designed to store nuclear waste for 100,000 years to come.” You’re pulled in from the first sentence: “The way into the underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree.” A cleft tree trunk, a darkened passage leading underground … Who wouldn’t want to tag along?

—Michael Hayward

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