LIFE BEYOND MEASURE
Out in April 2027
Pre-order your copy now (US, Canada, UK).
Just as he did in his New York Times bestseller, An Immense World, Ed Yong expands our perception of nature, this time by revealing the astonishing ways living things operate at different scales.
All around us, just beyond our awareness, life proceeds in astounding ways. A 100-ton blue whale swims easily across fathomless oceans, singing to fellow whales thousands of miles away. Alongside it a bacterium swims in a drop of seawater that is as vast to it as an ocean is to the whale. Hummingbirds are too speedy 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 defines 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 from 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 assemble their luminous chorus; a bristlecone pine rounds the corner of its fifth millennium; shorebirds fly without stopping across the world’s largest ocean; a pink, rubbery salamander the size of a forearm rarely moves at all; an ant colony develops a personality, and a host of other dazzling, disorienting entities expand our understanding of what life can be.
Mind-bending, exhilarating, funny, and profound, Life Beyond Measure is a call to cast off our human perspective, lose ourselves in the vastness and strangeness of nature, and, by doing so, discover how intimately connected to the rest of life we are.
Praise
“Page by compelling page, Life Beyond Measure takes us deep into the curious patterns of the living world. It is a thrilling journey of discovery, and Yong’s dazzling examples are delivered with wit and insight. From the profoundly weird to the awe-inspiring, these vivid encounters with other species create wonder at life’s improbable proliferation. It is so refreshing to shift away from our anthropocentric lens and see biodiversity as a mosaic of solutions of how to live in a complex world. From these fascinating stories emerges a sense of biological humility and respect for our more-than-human kin with whom we share this planet.” —Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass and The Serviceberry
“A tour de force. Life Beyond Measure is an invitation to transcend the limits of our bodies and enter a dazzling world of animals and plants that defies all expectation. Ed Yong’s uncanny ability to break down the walls between us and the rest of nature has left me transformed.” —Amy Tan, author of The Backyard Bird Chronicles
“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, author of Exit Party
“Ed Yong reveals our fellow Earth dwellers in ways so mind-twisting they border on psychedelia. A fully formed wasp smaller than an amoeba. Bacteria so big you can see one with bare eyes. Plants that secrete appetite suppressants to foil hungry insects. This book amazes like no other I’ve read. Yong is the perfect ambassador to the improbable wonderland of nature freed from the perceptual boxes we humans typically confine it to. His writing is clear, clever, vivid, the science set alight by his enthusiasm—for the unseen, the unimagined, and the unappreciated (Yong’s passage about hagfish slime deserves a Pulitzer all its own).” —Mary Roach, author of Stiff
“I read Life Beyond Measure with reverence and an unmitigated sense of awe, feeling the world expanding around me with every page. Ed Yong has written a gorgeous, profound book in which life comes forth in its sublime complexity to remind us of how modest yet precious our own individual existence is. With its unusual combination of erudition, heart, and humor, Life Beyond Measure sets a new standard in nature writing.” —Hernan Diaz, author of Trust
“Ed Yong has done it again. Brimming with utterly astonishing facts, Life Beyond Measure is Yong at his finest. This is a thoroughly delightful ride through the near-unimaginable diversity of life on Earth, which our human senses can only dimly grasp. Yet Yong helps us try: I find myself straining to imagine what it might be like to be a mosquito hurtling toward Earth on the underside of a raindrop, or a tree that first germinated 13,000 years before. Through his crystal-clear storytelling, we get a million new ways to see the world. A compendium of evolutionary miracles.” —Zoë Schlanger, author of The Light Eaters
“Life Beyond Measure is a lyrical testament to the marvels of nature by one of the great masters of science writing. In clear, accessible prose that by turns delights, charms, and astonishes, Ed Yong conducts a fascinating tour of beings whose lives are utterly different from our own, and shows how, in myriad ways, they make our lives richer. This is a must-read for anyone who cares about Planet Earth.” —Olivia Judson, author of The Co-Creation
“Yong makes the invisible visible, and beautiful.” —Laura Spinney, author of Pale Rider and Proto