MUSTREADS

Out now in paperback

UNDERLAND by Robert Macfarlane

(Penguin £10.99, 496 pp) ‘PHILIP LARKIN famously proposed that what will survive of us is love. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic, swine bones and lead-207.’

Robert Macfarlane’s previous books have explored mountains, wilderness and pilgrim paths. Underland finds him leaving the familiar world of sunlight to descend into the intricate realms beneath our feet.

From the interconnected tree roots of Epping Forest to Paris’s city-beneath-ac i t y, Macfarlane interrogates the burrowings of humans into the body of the earth.

As our ability to shape the world has increased, he suggests, so has our responsibility for the long afterlives of that shaping. Lyrical and thoughtprovoking, Underland asks, ‘Are we being good ancestors?’

MY PENGUIN YEAR by Lindsay McCrae

(Hodder £9.99, 304 pp) AGED 14, Lindsay McCrae wrote to Springwatch telling them about the wildlife in his garden. Their response was to lend him a film camera.

It was the beginning of a career that would eventually find him spending 11 months in the Antarctic, filming Emperor penguins for the 2018 series Dynasties, narrated by David Attenborough. It was Lindsay’s dream job, but the difficult decision to spend almost a year in a frozen wilderness became harder still when his partner Becky became pregnant.

With heart- stopping accounts of human and penguin jeopardy — including the moment when the team had to decide whether to dig an ice ramp to save a trapped penguin colony from certain death — this is a candid and moving memoir of the reality behind the making of a stunning documentary.

CLOUDS OF LOVE AND WAR by Rachel Billington

(Universe £10, 352 pp) IN THE spring of 1939, Eddie Chaffey is an Oxford undergraduate obsessed with flying. His pacifist father, Fred, is horrified by Eddie’s ambition to join the RAF.

Alongside his passion for flying, Eddie has begun a gentle flirtation with Eva Speke, the quietly resolute art student daughter of an otherworldly Oxford professor.

Rachel Billington’s masterly novel, set amid the uncertainty and intensity of conflict, chronicles Eddie and Eva’s tender love story as it unfolds across a vividly described wartime landscape — from raffish RAF bases to the beautiful West Country family home where Eddie and Eva find an all-too-brief sanctuary of love and hope.