A New Map of Wonders | Granta

  • Published: 03/05/2018
  • ISBN: 9781783781355
  • 129x20mm
  • 364 pages

A New Map of Wonders

Caspar Henderson

A New Map of Wonders charts a course through the realm of the fascinating and awe-inspiring.

With the curiosity and enthusiasm of a great explorer, the award-winning Caspar Henderson celebrates and explains the wonder of light and the origins of the universe, the myriad marvels of the human body and the natural world — and reveals the wonders to come: the technologies that will transform human experience and change what we will find wonderful.

Drawing on philosophy and natural history, art and religion, neuroscience and nanotechnology, A New Map of Wonders is a celebration of life — a rich and inspiring guide, encouraging us to see the world anew.

This book does exactly what it says on the cover, and shows us where wonder is to be found. His account of familiar phenomena shows how unfamiliar and extraordinary they really are

Philip Pullman

A study of awe written by a writer who evokes the fascination of the natural world as eye-openingly as anyone I've read

Tom Holland, Observer

Henderson does a wonderful job... you can't read the life chapter without being struck by the contingency of it all - the accident of our existence

David Aaronovitch, The Times

The Author

CASPAR HENDERSON has been a journalist and an editor: a contributor to BBC Radio 4, Financial Times, Guardian, Nature, New Scientist and openDemocracy. His debut, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings (Granta, 2012), won the Roger Deakin Award of the Society of Authors and the Jerwood Award of the Royal Society of Literature, and was shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. A New Map of Wonders (Granta) was published in 2017. A Book of Noises will be published by Granta in October 2023. He lives in Oxford.

More about the author →

From the Same Author

Caspar Henderson on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir | Granta 162

The Golden Record

Caspar Henderson

‘The two copies of the Golden Record were shot into space nearly fifty years ago.’

Caspar Henderson on music sent into space by NASA.

Essays & Memoir | Granta 162

Running

Caspar Henderson

‘Often, a road is the least interesting path to follow.’

Essays & Memoir | Granta 162

Barely Imagined Beings

Caspar Henderson

‘Monsters of one kind or another are woven into virtually all the cultures of which we have record.’