An Immense World

Bodley Head 464pp £20

The Week Bookshop £15.99

“We may feel like we are the masters of our planet, having mapped every inch of its landmass and stared into the guts of an atom,” said Killian Fox in The Observer. But when it comes to understanding what it’s like to be another animal – say, a bird navigating by the Earth’s magnetic field – we “barely know where to start”. This “magnificent” book about animal perception reveals a world more wondrously strange than we could have guessed: it’s full of “little astonishments, beautifully rendered”. We learn that scallops have up to 200 eyes on the edge of their shells, that crickets have ears on their knees, and that most animals can see in ultraviolet colours. Ed Yong, a Pulitzer-winning British science writer who works in America, “succeeds brilliantly in shedding light on these alien worlds”.

Our human senses are tuned to detect only a fraction of our surroundings, said Jackie Higgins in The Daily Telegraph. It’s hard enough to understand, for instance, what it’s like to have a dog’s powerful sense of smell. It’s harder still when it comes to senses we do not share: sharks, for instance, sensing their prey’s electrical energy. Yong recreates the world in its “bewildering immensity” as he takes us on an “encyclopaedic, rigorously researched” journey. Some non-human senses are outlandish and even scary, said James McConnachie in The Sunday Times. Catfish have taste buds all over their body; if you licked one, Yong notes, “you’d taste each other”. Rattlesnakes can detect thermal radiation given off by other creatures. Yong makes “heroic” efforts to try to understand how any of this might feel: for the snakes, he suggests, infrared could be integrated with vision, as if it were another colour. His delightful book prompts “a radical rethink about the limits of what we know – what the world is, even”.