
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle Cloud Reader.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.


An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER) Hardcover – 30 Jun. 2022
Ed Yong (Author) See search results for this author |
Amazon Price | New from | Used from |
Kindle Edition
"Please retry" | — | — |
Audible Audiobooks, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
£0.00
| Free with your Audible trial |
- Choose from over 20,000 locations across the UK
- FREE unlimited deliveries at no additional cost for all customers
- Find your preferred location and add it to your address book
- Dispatch to this address when you check out
Enhance your purchase
**AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK**
**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER**
'Wonderful, mind-broadening... a journey to alternative realities as extraordinary as any you'll find in science fiction' The Times, Book of the Week
'Magnificent' Guardian
Enter a new dimension - the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.
The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving only a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes us into previously unfathomable dimensions - the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.
We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth's magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and humans that wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile's scaly face is as sensitive as a lover's fingertips, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision.
We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries which lie unsolved.
Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the threads of scent, waves of electromagnetism and pulses of pressure that surround us. Because in order to understand our world we don't need to travel to other places; we need to see through other eyes.
'A stunning achievement - steeped in science but suffused with magic'
Siddhartha Mukherjee, author The Emperor of All Maladies
'Magnificent - an unbelievably immersive and mind-blowing account of how other animals experience our world'
Peter Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of Trees and The Inner Life of Animals
'A delightful sensory experience: to see the world through the touch-vision of a scallop, to taste through the feet of a mosquito and hear through the feet of an elephant'
Gaia Vince, author of Transcendence
- Print length464 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBodley Head
- Publication date30 Jun. 2022
- Dimensions16.2 x 4.2 x 24 cm
- ISBN-101847926088
- ISBN-13978-1847926081
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
From the Publisher

|
|
|
|
---|---|---|---|
The side-facing slits of a dog's nostrils allow its exhalations to waft more odours into its nose. |
Catfish are swimming tongues, with taste buds dotted all over their skins. |
The brittle star's entire body is an eye, but only during the daytime. |
Strangely, the blue-throated hummingbird sings ultrasonic notes that it cannot hear. |
Product description
Review
Full of extraordinary discoveries... an encyclopaedic, rigorously researched journey... recasts the world in breath-taking, bewildering immensity ― Daily Telegraph
Yong succeeds in bringing a sense of grandeur to life on every scale ― Financial Times
A magic well of surprising, enlightening discoveries about the sensory worlds of other species... A brilliant book, marvellous and mesmerizing -- Jennifer Ackerman, author of The Genius of Birds
I love this book. Reading it is a delightful sensory experience... I truly enjoyed Yong's adventures in Wonderland! ― Gaia Vince, author of Transcendence
A stunning achievement - steeped in science but suffused with magic -- Siddhartha Mukherjee, author The Emperor of All Maladies
Magnificent - an unbelievably immersive and mind-blowing account of how other animals experience our world -- Peter Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of Trees and The Inner Life of Animals
Like stepping into a new kind of Alice in Wonderland. The perfect mixture of revelation, curiosity, science, beautiful prose and buckets full of wonders -- Andrea Wulf, author of The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World
A cornucopia of wonders... a fascinating reminder of the humbling truth that most of what happens among life forms on Earth is beyond our ken -- David Quammen, author of Spillover
An expansive, constantly revelatory exploration of the biosphere's sensorium... Ed Yong is my favourite contemporary science writer -- William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and The Peripheral
A journal of discovery and animal magic, a sensory exploration that is a joy to read -- Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief
Every page finds the reader mouthing quiet whoa's, as the world she thought she knew opens out into a hundred others, improbable, strange, and fabulous. -- Mary Roach, author of Fuzz and Stiff
An Immense World took my hand and brought me on a journey I'll never forget. After reading this book, I'll never look at our planet the same way again -- Clint Smith, author of How the Word is Passed
A whirlwind tour of animal perceptual abilities. A magnificent book ― Frans de Waal, author of Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist
A tour of places that are, in essence, unknowable... Yet Yong...proves an outstanding guide... Beautifully written and painstakingly researched... this fantastic book leaves you wondering what else is left to be discovered ― The Times, *Book of the Week*
Ed Yong's fascinating new book on the complex behaviours of creatures uncovers a universe of unfathomable beauty... Not since Oliver Morton's masterpiece of popular science Eating the Sun (2007) has a book so persuasively made the case that the Earth is greater than we know ― New Statesman
A wonderful, wonder-full book ― Literary Review
Both eye-opening and humbling ― Radio Times
Remarkable... a delight, a book that prompts awe at the world around us ― Sunday Times, *Summer Reads of 2022*
A tour of our own world as we may never experience it ― Geography, *Book of the Month*
About the Author
Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.
Product details
- Publisher : Bodley Head (30 Jun. 2022)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 464 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1847926088
- ISBN-13 : 978-1847926081
- Dimensions : 16.2 x 4.2 x 24 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 1,226 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 1 in Animal Physiology
- 1 in Extinction & Endangered Species
- 1 in Animal Rights
- Customer reviews:
About the author

Ed Yong is an award-winning science writer who reports for The Atlantic. His writing has also appeared in National Geographic, the New Yorker, Wired, the New York Times, Nature, New Scientist, Scientific American, and more. He talked about mind-controlling parasites at the TED2014 conference, and his talk has been viewed more than 1.4 million times.
He is the winner of the Byron H. Waksman Award for Excellence in the Public Communication of Life Sciences (2016), the Michael E. DeBakey Journalism Award (2016), a National Academies Keck Science Communication Award (2010) and awards from the Association of British Science Writers for Best Science Blog (2014) and Best Communication of Science in a Non-Science Context (2012).
His first book, I CONTAIN MULTITUDES, about the amazing partnerships between microbes and animals, was published in 2016.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings, help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyses reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 July 2022
Top reviews from United Kingdom
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
nodoubt, he enlightens the reader on how these creatures employ special bodily faculties by which
sensation is roused. Yes, it is so stark and realistic. According to my rationale, this book takes you, the
reader, in-depth into another world which I recommend is very fascinating.
Throw in the difficulties of trying to decide just what senses there actually are and how to define and you get some feeling for the complexities being tackled in this book. I did like the quote from Proust - ""not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes". It felt appropriate.
I found the journey I was taken on was fascinating - almost to an overwhelming degree. When I'm reading a book to review I generally read just that book continuously. This one I took breaks from. In part there was just so much to process here (it wasn't a subject I knew much about). This is not a criticism of the book however. It is written in a very accessible way for something quite so complex.
While I mentioned that the book started with the idea that it was not going to make comparisons and ranking of senses I do think it "failed" on the comparisons aspect. However it would be virtually impossible to write this book about senses within a species without referring to the senses that are predominant in another species. I didn't find that this bothered me.
It's hard to come up with one or two favourite topics in this book - there were just so many for me. The sheer sensitivity of some animal senses just blew me away. That owls have asymmetric ears that are accurate to 2 degrees. That otters and seals can track the "wake" left by fishes from 200 yards away. That birds hear bird song very differently from us and that the song varies in ways we simply cannot hear. That turtles have inbuilt location senses that are remarkable. There is simply so much in here to be fascinated by.
I found the last chapter is quite brief but very interesting. It did feel slightly out of sync with the rest of the book. It concerns the way we disrupt animal senses in some quite dramatic fashions. For me it was a subject that could have had more space devoted to it - maybe another book!
This really is not a book to rush. It deserves time to be taken over it and will reward the interested reader amply. For me the fact that in most cases our senses are relatively poor was an overarching aspect of this. Related to that is the fact that, certainly in the past, we have attempted to judge animals senses by what we think they might be like. This is simply so far from the mark in so many cases as to emphasize how little we know and understand about this world we inhabit and abuse. This is a fascinating insight into the diversity of animal senses - I'd happily recommend it to anyone with any interest in the subject.
My thanks to the author and the publisher for an advance copy of this book

By Amazon Customer on 10 July 2022


'An Immense World' is not a book you can read in a few sittings. Yong actually expects quite a lot of his readers, which isn't a bad thing. Every page is full of fascinating information. By coincidence, shortly before starting Yong's book, I started listening to 'Sentient' by Jackie Higgins which, perhaps unfortunately, is extremely similar in theme to this book (they even cover a lot of the same scientists). However, I prefer Yong's book, because in true journalistic fashion the author physically meets with many of the scientists whose work he covers, and gets to meet quite a few of the animals too. Which led to quite a few fun moments - a nice injection of brevity and illumination. Another element that makes 'An Immense World' superior, in my view, is the analysis he frequently presents along the lines of "we never used to imagine this... what else are we missing about this animal?". There's a sense of deep wonder and mystery.
For all my praise, I cannot give this book 5 stars. The reason? THE FOOTNOTES. OH MY GOD. Most pages had at least one footnote, sometimes three or even four. On some pages, the footnotes took up at least half the page. I hate the idea of missing out on any information, so I read them all, but it really broke up the narrative for me. Neither did it help that on my e-reader, a lot of the footnotes went over onto the next page. Even more galling is that a lot of them could have easily been folded into the narrative. What I suspect has happened is that Yong went over his word limit, so he simply moved some content to the footnotes. The result is that it sadly diminished my reading experience.