The ecological principles at work in each period remain the same across millennia: “although the cast is different, the play is the same”. As Halliday shows, “Earth’s dynamism throughout geological history provides a natural laboratory”. From the frigid, sand-blown plains of Alaska 20,000 years ago in the Pleistocene, with its lumbering mammoths (“a universal symbol of a lost past”), to Australia in the Ediacaran era, 550 million years ago when the Eoandromeda emerged, one of the earliest creatures we can call an animal – a relative of comb jellies in today’s oceans: “what exists now can only ever come from what existed before.”īut this is more than just an exercise in intellectual curiosity. Like a time-travelling tour guide, he introduces us to the extraordinary creatures and often inhospitable terrains that existed in these now-extinct ecosystems, including dinosaur-dominated forests and a glass reef thousands of kilometres long. It is an immensely impressive attempt to use imagination to bring scientific research into the deep history of our planet vividly alive, mentally stripping away the hedgerows, buildings and infrastructure of human urban civilization, to reveal the much older and stranger landscapes that once existed.Įach of his 16 chapters moves progressively further back in time, using fossils and geological data to recreate what it would have been like to experience a particular landscape. In what he admits is a personal interpretation of the deep past, he has written a wonderfully rich popularisation of his specialism. In his day job, Halliday studies fossils and geology to find clues as to how extinct creatures fitted into diverse communities of organisms “that courted and fell sick, showed off bright feathers or flowers, called and buzzed”. In this remarkable book, Thomas Halliday – a researcher in the Department of Earth Sciences at Birmingham University – travels back through time to explore our planet’s previous landscapes and ecosystems, or “otherlands”. If those 4.5 billion years of history were condensed into the span of a single day, dinosaurs were destroyed 21 minutes before the end and written human history wouldn’t begin until the last tenth of a second. Life itself is 4 billion years old, with multi-celled organisms emerging some 2 billion years ago. The Earth’s geological history stretches back 4.5 billion years. Lucy Atkins £9.29 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Yet Love Marriage is largely engaging, entertaining and relevant and there will be lots of love for it. And now Ali is back with Love Marriage, a novel about the rocky engagement of Yasmin Ghorami, a 26-year-old trainee doctor whose parents are originally from Kolkata, and fellow medic Joe Sangster, the upper middle-class son of an outspoken feminist author.Īli is a good storyteller, sometimes enlightening, but there is the feeling of a smaller, tighter, more devastating novel lurking here. Critical responses to all three were mixed. In the Kitchen followed, a meandering tale of a London chef in crisis, and then Untold Story, an odd novel in which Princess Diana fakes her death and moves to small-town America. First came Alentejo Blue, loosely linked vignettes set in a Portuguese village that bore almost no relation in style, conviction or tone to Brick Lane. In the decade following her bestselling 2003 debut, Brick Lane, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize then turned into a film, Monica Ali produced three more novels. It is a painfully resonant book and could not have come at a more urgent time.įatima Bhutto £11.43 (RRP £12.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Caste joins the New York Times’ “1619 Project” in exposing the edifice of white platinum privilege and exploding how we understand American power and supremacy. Wilkerson has a deft narrative touch and she activates the history in her pages, bringing all its horror and possibility to light, illuminating both the bygone and the present. This is an American reckoning and so it should be. In Caste, Wilkerson sets out to understand American hierarchy, which she compares with two of the best known caste systems in the world: that of India, the very birthplace of caste, and of Nazi Germany, where caste as a modern experiment in barbarism was ultimately vanquished. It was while working on her sweeping, Pulitzer prize-winning first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, a history of African Americans’ great migration out of the South, that Wilkerson realised she was studying a deeply ingrained caste system that had been in place longer than the nation itself had existed, dating back to colonial Virginia. The full pageantry of American cruelty is on display in Caste, an expansive interrogation of racism, institutionalised inequality and injustice.
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