A daring and visionary new narrative of the emergence of life, one that refocuses our attention on the beautiful and mysterious tango between life and Earth itself, from Olivia Judson, the bestselling and award-winning author of Dr Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation

These are questions as old as time itself: Where did we come from? What are we? What does it mean to be “alive”? And how do we fit into the grand planetary and cosmic tapestry unfolding across time and space all around us? With rare style and radical originality, Judson proposes a grand new theory of life’s evolution on earth, advancing a bold and dazzling argument about how Earth went from a barren, rocky wasteland pummeled by asteroids 4.2 billion years ago to a planet of riotous life today. She reveals how Earth does not merely host life, it creates life, and, in turn, how life itself became a powerful geological force, far mightier than volcanoes, on a par with the great tectonic plates as they grind and shudder their way around the Earth. This is a mind-blowing contention that reorients everything, linking us humans not only to all other lifeforms, but to the very fabric of the planet itself.

Always accessible, Judson’s prose is by turns erudite, philosophical, amusing, poetic, and preternaturally vivid. She divides planetary history into five epochs—rock, light, oxygen, flesh, and fire—each unlocking of a new source of energy, which coincides with new organisms able to exploit that source and alter their planet. Judson calls it a “stepwise construction of a life-planet system,” explaining how these successive energy revolutions created the conditions for a rich array of life, from amoebas, to cabbages, to humans. There is an epic, stirring, and enduring symbiosis between life and Earth, in her telling, and we are all participants.