The Book of Barely Imagined Beings | Granta

  • Published: 11/10/2012
  • ISBN: 9781847085917
  • Granta Books
  • 448 pages

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Caspar Henderson

From Axolotl to Zebrafish, discover a host of barely imagined beings: real creatures that are often more astonishing than anything dreamt in the pages of a medieval bestiary. Ranging from the depths of the ocean to the most arid corners of the earth, Caspar Henderson captures the beauty and bizarreness of the many living forms we thought we knew and some we could never have contemplated, inviting us to better imagine the precarious world we inhabit.

A witty, vivid blend of pioneering natural history and spiritual primer, infectiously celebratory about life’s sheer ingenuity and variety, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings is a mind-expanding, wonder-inducing read.

Wondrous, capacious and strange

Simon Critchley

Utterly extraordinary book: glorious and genre-bending; a spell-book of species that entranced me from its first page... A celebration of nature's astonishing variety - and a warning as to what we are so rapidly losing

Robert Macfarlane

Wonderful, beautiful and engrossing... a delight

Robin Ince

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

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‘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

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

Essays & Memoir | Granta 162

Barely Imagined Beings

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