Is there an audiobook of Underland: A Deep Time Journey?

Yes. Underland: A Deep Time Journey has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Matthew Waterson.

How long is the Underland: A Deep Time Journey audiobook?

The Underland: A Deep Time Journey audiobook runs 12 hr 3 min.

Is Underland: A Deep Time Journey on Kindle Unlimited?

No. Underland: A Deep Time Journey was not included with Kindle Unlimited when we last checked on August 3, 2026.

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane book cover for the Book of the Day nature book review

Our score

4.5/ 5

Outstanding

Listen to Underland: A Deep Time Journey free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

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EDITION PUBLISHEDJune 2019

PublisherPenguin Books, Limited

Genres

Non-Fiction Nature Philosophy

Themes

Deep time and human insignificanceBurial, memory, and what we hide undergroundThe Anthropocene and our lasting marks on the planetDarkness as both refuge and dread

Underland: A Deep Time Journey

Name: Underland: A Deep Time Journey
Price: 7.76 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane's Underland goes down instead of up: into sea caves, glaciers, and a vault built to hold nuclear waste for a hundred thousand years. It's nature writing of unusual ambition, fusing geology, myth, and reportage to ask what humans bury, hoard, and leave behind in the rock.

The Review

Our take

After years of writing about high, open country, Macfarlane turns the compass downward, and the inversion suits him. Underland is organized around three things humans do with the dark beneath us: we shelter in it, we extract from it, and we dispose into it. That triad gives the book a spine a looser collection of travel essays would lack. Each chapter is a descent into a real place, reported with the author's own body in the frame, squeezing through gaps, wading meltwater, trusting strangers underground. The source material the publisher leans on covers prehistoric art in Norwegian sea caves and the blue interior of the Greenland ice, and those are exactly the sections where the reporting feels most alive.

What lifts this above adventure writing is the deep-time argument running underneath it. Macfarlane keeps pulling back from human scale to geological scale, and the vertigo is real. He wants you to feel how brief our tenure is against the patience of stone and ice, then sit with the uncomfortable corollary: we are now leaving marks that will outlast every language we speak. The nuclear hiding place, a hole dug so that beings tens of thousands of years from now will know to stay away from it, becomes the book's dark hinge. How do you warn a future that may not read, may not speak, may not be human at all? That problem haunts the whole book.

The prose is the obvious draw and, for some readers, the obvious risk. Macfarlane writes at a high lyric pitch, attentive to the texture of rock and the roots of words, and he can turn a slow walk through a cave into something taut. I'll confess the ice chapters were where I stopped reading for adventure and started reading for awe; the calving edge of the Greenland sheet is described with a precision that made me put the book down and just sit. He's also a generous companion to the people he meets, from cavers to scientists, and that human warmth keeps the cosmic scale from going cold.

There's a genuine intellectual payoff beyond the scenery. You finish Underland with a sharpened sense of the Anthropocene as something physical and stratigraphic, a layer being laid down right now, rather than an abstraction. Macfarlane handles environmental dread without preaching; he lets the places carry the argument. The book is also quietly about grief, about burial as a form of care, about the human impulse to hide what we love and what we fear in the same darkness. It's more emotional than its geology-heavy premise suggests.

Why you should read

Readers who loved Macfarlane's The Old Ways or Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams
Fans of literary nature writing that thinks in geological time
Anyone drawn to the Anthropocene, deep time, and our environmental legacy
People who like reported essays with a strong philosophical undertow

What to expect

The prose runs lush and the pace is meditative; readers wanting a brisk, plot-driven narrative may find some chapters slow going
Some readers find the lyricism tips into overwriting in its densest passages; if you prefer plainer, more direct nonfiction, the style may wear on you

Two honest cautions. This moves at a contemplative pace; it's a book for evenings, read in sections, not a single sitting. And the lyricism that rewards patient readers tips, in places, toward the overwritten. A fair number of readers in the large review thread admire the book deeply while wishing Macfarlane trusted a plain sentence more often, and I felt that too in the densest passages. If you want propulsion and clarity over atmosphere, those stretches may test you. But for readers who care about landscape, language, and the long view, the density is the point, and the book will alter how you regard whatever lies beneath your feet.

Reviewed by Ellis · How our reviews are written

Our verdict

4.5/ 5

Outstanding

Listen to Underland: A Deep Time Journey free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

Buy on Amazon

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Prices may vary.

Where to read or listen

Is there an audiobook of Underland: A Deep Time Journey?: Yes. Underland: A Deep Time Journey has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Matthew Waterson.
Listen to Underland: A Deep Time Journey free with an Audible trial
We earn from qualifying Amazon purchases.
How long is the Underland: A Deep Time Journey audiobook?: The Underland: A Deep Time Journey audiobook runs 12 hr 3 min.
Is Underland: A Deep Time Journey on Kindle Unlimited?: No. Underland: A Deep Time Journey was not included with Kindle Unlimited when we last checked on August 3, 2026.
How much does Underland: A Deep Time Journey cost?: On Amazon: Kindle $7.76, Paperback $8.17, Hardcover $17.00. Prices as of August 26, 2026 at 3:46 AM EDT and may change.

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Common questions

What is Underland: A Deep Time Journey about?: After years of writing about high, open country, Macfarlane turns the compass downward, and the inversion suits him. Underland is organized around three things humans do with the dark beneath us: we shelter in it, we extract from it, and we dispose into it. That triad gives the book a spine a…
Is Underland: A Deep Time Journey worth reading?: We scored Underland: A Deep Time Journey 4.5 out of 5. Robert Macfarlane's Underland goes down instead of up: into sea caves, glaciers, and a vault built to hold nuclear waste for a hundred thousand years. It's nature writing of unusual ambition, fusing geology, myth, and reportage to ask what humans bury, hoard, and leave behind…