How much of the folk tales of our ancestors is rooted in fact, and what can they tell us about the future?In today's society it is the written word that holds the authority. We are more likely to trust the words found in a history textbook over the version of history retold by a friend – after all, human memory is unreliable, and how can you be sure your friend hasn't embellished the facts? But before humans were writing down their knowledge, they were passing it o...

Discover ancient civilizations that have disappeared beneath the ocean's surface and explore how the science of submergence adds to our knowledge of human history.The traces of much of human history – and that which preceded it – lie beneath the ocean surface; broken up, dispersed, often buried and always mysterious. This is fertile ground for speculation, even myth-making, but also a topic on which geologists and climatologists have increasingly focused in recent ...

Winner of the 2020 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for nonfiction and the 2019 NSW Premier's History Awards for general history‘Wonderfully researched and beautifully written’ Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan‘Succeeds in conjuring a lost world’ Dava Sobel, author of LongitudeFor more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle stretching from H...

WINNER OF THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2018WINNER OF THE JEFFERIES AWARD FOR NATURE WRITING 2017The full story of seabirds from one of the greatest nature writers. The book looks at the pattern of their lives, their habitats, the threats they face and the passions they inspire – beautifully illustrated by Kate Boxer.Seabirds are master navigators, thriving in the most demanding environment on earth. In this masterly book, drawing on all the...

WINNER OF THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTIONWINNER OF THE NIB LITERARY AWARDFINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR NONFICTIONHIGHLY COMMENDED IN THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR WRITING ON GLOBAL CONSERVATIONA SUNDAY INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR‘There is a kind of hauntedness in wild animals today: a spectre related to environmental change … ...

T****he monumental statues of Easter Island, both so magisterial and so forlorn, gazing out in their imposing rows over the island’s barren landscape, have been the source of great mystery ever since the island was first discovered by Europeans on Easter Sunday 1722. How could the ancient people who inhabited this tiny speck of land, the most remote in the vast expanse of the Pacific islands, have built such monumental works? No such astonishing numbers of massive statues ...

Madagascar is a land where lizards scream and monkey-like lemurs sing songs of inexpressible beauty. KKnown as the Great Red Island, it is a place where fossa and tenrecs, vangas and aye ayes thrive in a true 'Lost World' alongside bizarre plants like the octopus tree and the three-cornered palm. And where the ancestors of the Malagasy, as the island's 18 tribes are collectively known, come alive in rollicking ceremonies known as "turning the bones."This natural and cultural histor...

Why is it that the island of Bali is home to Asian birds such as the weaver bird, and the neighboring island of Lombok, just 24 kilometers away across a narrow strait, echoes to the screams of Australian cockatoos?This extraordinary biological boundary is known today as The Wallace Line. Like his friendly rival and fellow biologist Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace traveled the world collecting and studying species that were new to science. His legacy is The Wallace Line, a nea...

The extraordinary sixty-thousand-year history of how the Pacific islands were settled.'Takes readers on a narrative odyssey' Wall Street Journal, Books of the Year'Highlights a dizzying burst of new research' The Economist'A refreshing addition to the canon of literature that contemplates Oceanic navigation' Noelle Kahanu'I would not be surprised if, after reading this masterpiece, many read...

An award-winning scholar explores the sixty-thousand-year history of the Pacific islands in this dazzling, deeply researched account.One of the Best Books of 2021 — Wall Street JournalThe islands of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia stretch across a huge expanse of ocean and encompass a multitude of different peoples. Starting with Captain James Cook, the earliest European explorers to visit the Pacific were astounded and perple...

Since before recorded history, people have congregated near water. But as growing populations around the globe continue to flow toward the coasts on an unprecedented scale and climate change raises water levels, our relationship to the sea has begun to take on new and potentially catastrophic dimensions. The latest generation of coastal dwellers lives largely in ignorance of the history of those who came before them, the natural environment, and the need to live sustainably on the world's ...

Welcome to a carnival unlike anything that you have ever read about, visited, or even imagined before. Here, before your very eyes, you will encounter bizarre, anomalous creatures of every conceivable (and inconceivable!) kind—a veritable menagerie of cryptozoological mysteries to dazzle and delight, tantalize and terrify. For this is Mirabilis—a realm of marvels, wonders, miracles...and monsters!Peer through the shadows and see what you may. Was that scuttling horror a spider the ...