The Uninhabitable Earth

Sunday Times and New York Times Bestseller

"A defining book of the epoch" - Matt Haig
"If you read only one nonfiction book this year, it should probably be this one" - David Sexton, Evening Standard

Selected as Book of the Year 2019 by the Sunday Times, Spectator, and New Statesman.
A Waterstones Paperback of the Year and nominated for Foyles Book of the Year 2019.
Longlisted for the PEN / E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.

It is worse, much worse, than you think.

The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as harmful as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and if your fear about it is dominated by the fear of rising sea levels, you are barely scratching the surface of what horrors are possible, even in the life of today’s teenager.

In recent decades, the term 'Anthropocene' has entered public consciousness - a name for the geological era we are now living in, defined by human intervention in the life of the planet. But as optimistic as you may be about the assumption that we have devastated the natural world, which we have undoubtedly done, it is something entirely different to consider the possibility that we have merely provoked it, first in ignorance and then in denial, constructing a climate system that will now wage war against us for many centuries to come, perhaps until it destroys us. In the meantime, it will reshape us and change every aspect of our way of life - the planet no longer nurtures a dream of abundance, but a living nightmare.