Ten Million Aliens: A Journey Through the Entire Animal Kingdom

Life on planet earth is not weirder than we imagine. It’s weirder than we are capable of imagining. And we’re all in it together: humans, blue whales, rats, birds of paradise, beetles, molluscs the size of buses, gladiator slugs, bdelloid rotifers that haven’t had sex for millions of years, and water bears—creatures that can be boiled, frozen, and fired off into space without dying.

We’re all part of the animal kingdom, appearing in what Darwin called “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful.” In this audacious book, Simon Barnes brings together all of the world’s creatures, seeking not what sets them all apart but what unites all. He explores arcane knowledge from the works of Darwin to James Joyce and David Attenborough to Sherlock Holmes, in addition to telling his own wild, don’t-try-this-at-home adventures in humorous and compulsively readable prose.