Author(s): Helen Gordon

History | Earth Sciences

The story of the Earth is written into our landscape: it's there in the curves of hills, the colours of stone, surprising eruptions of vegetation. Wanting a fresh perspective on her own life, the writer Helen Gordon set out to read that epic narrative.

Her odyssey takes her from the secret fossils of London to the 3-billion-year-old rocks of the Scottish Highlands, and from a state-of-the-art earthquake monitoring system in California to one of the world's most dangerous volcanic complexes in Naples. At every step, she finds that the apparently solid ground beneath our feet isn't quite as it seems.

Review: 'The reward of Helen Gordon's profoundly considered and far-reaching book is that it opens up the dizzying view of geological time ... Notes from Deep Time reaches into a place that, in a post-religious era, offers a glimpse of something close to eternity' - Philip Marsden

'A marvel-rich masterclass of narrative non-fiction ... To escape from the present into deep time with such a companionable guide is clarifying, almost therapeutic, and at times gratifyingly dizzying' - Max Porter, author

'If there were ever a good time to think about deep time, it's now ... A whirlwind tour of our planet's deep past and far future ... succeeds in grounding our existence firmly in the context of geological time' - Alexandra Witze

'Wonderfully expansive' - Philip Hoare, author

'A book as multi-layered as the deep-time planet itself' - Sara Wheeler, author

Author Biography: Helen Gordon's books include a novel, Landfall (Penguin, 2011), and Being A Writer, a compendium written with Travis Elborough (Francis Lincoln, 2017). She is married to an earth scientist and lives mostly in the Holocene.