Description

**SUNDAY TIMES and NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER**
**NEW YORK TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, OBSERVER, ECONOMIST, PROSPECT, GUARDIAN, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT and SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022**
**Winner of 2023 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction**

Enter a new dimension – the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.

The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving only a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes us into previously unfathomable dimensions – the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.

We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and humans that wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision.

Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the threads of scent, waves of electromagnetism and pulses of pressure that surround us. Because in order to understand our world we need to see through other eyes.

‘Yong’s colourful, character-filled writing reveals a multidimensional world that has hitherto remained hidden to us’ Guardian, Books of the Year 2022

‘An Immense World… manages to be both a celebration of our species’ genius for observation while also revealing how narrow and partial is our “sense” of things.’ Mark Cocker, New Statesman Books of the Year 2022

Publisher Review

I love this book. Reading it is a delightful sensory experience... I truly enjoyed Yong's adventures in Wonderland! * Gaia Vince, author of Transcendence * A magic well of surprising, enlightening discoveries about the sensory worlds of other species. With wit, insight, and masterful storytelling, Ed Yong invites us to sway outside ourselves and dwell in the lives of orb weavers, bats, beetles, and whales, to experience the exquisite hearing of birds that shifts with the seasons, the touch sensitivity of manatee, crocodile, and octopus, the vibrational landscapes of spiders. A brilliant book, marvellous and mesmerizing -- Jennifer Ackerman, author of The Genius of Birds A stunning achievement - steeped in science but suffused with magic -- Siddhartha Mukherjee, author The Emperor of All Maladies Magnificent - an unbelievably immersive and mind-blowing account of how other animals experience our world. We knew that were not alone but An Immense World shows how incredibly rich and diverse our world in fact is -- Peter Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of Trees and The Inner Life of Animals An expansive, constantly revelatory exploration of the biosphere's sensorium... Ed Yong is my favourite contemporary science writer -- William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and The Peripheral Every page finds the reader mouthing quiet whoa's, as the world she thought she knew opens out into a hundred others, improbable, strange, and fabulous. I don't know how to put in words the awe I felt while reading this book -- Mary Roach, author of Fuzz and Stiff A cornucopia of wonders... a fascinating reminder of the humbling truth that most of what happens among life forms on Earth is beyond our ken -- David Quammen, author of Spillover An Immense World is a journal of discovery and animal magic, a sensory exploration that is a joy to read -- Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief A whirlwind tour of animal perceptual abilities. A magnificent book packed with information that both challenges our imagination and fills us with wonder about the living world * Frans de Waal, author of Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist * An Immense World took my hand and brought me on a journey I'll never forget. After reading this book, I'll never look at our planet the same way again -- Clint Smith, author of How the Word is Passed