Life Beyond Measure

In his prize-winning Sunday Times bestseller, An Immense World, Ed Yong invited us to perceive the world through other animals’ senses. Now he transforms our view of the world once again by revealing the hidden wonders of life at different scales.

All around us, just beyond our awareness, life proceeds in astonishing ways. The 100-ton blue whale easily crosses oceans, singing to fellow whales thousands of miles away. Alongside it a bacterium swims in a drop of seawater that is as vast for it as an ocean is to the whale. Hummingbirds move too quickly for us to follow, while plants move too languorously for us to perceive.

Every living thing operates at its own scale – the blend of size, range, pace, longevity, and influence that define the contours and rhythms of a life. We tend to think of the human scale as life’s default. But in Life Beyond Measure, Ed Yong coaxes us outside of our medium-sized, medium-lived, medium-paced, moderately mobile range and introduces us to entirely new worlds, some that could fit between two grains of sand. Fireflies assembling their luminous chorus; a bristlecone pine that's older than paper rounds the corner of its fifth millennium; shorebirds that fly across the world's biggest ocean without stopping; Pando, a forest that may be a single tree; and a host of other dazzling, disorienting entities expand our understanding of what life can be.

Mind-bending, exhilarating, and profound, Life Beyond Measure is a call to cast off our human perspective, to lose ourselves in the vastness and strangeness of nature, and by doing so, to discover how intimately connected to the rest of life we are.

'Utterly extraordinary. Yong's spectacular new book is not just a mesmerizing examination of the wonders of life on Earth; it's no less than a biography of life itself' EMILY ST JOHN MANDEL

© Ed Yong 2027 (P) Penguin Audio 2027