Allen Lane wins 'manifesto for time' from Higgins in five-way auction

Allen Lane has scooped Time Beings, a study of how animals give us insights into time, by filmmaker Jackie Higgins, following a five-way auction. 

Laura Stickney, publishing director at Penguin Press, bought UK and Commonwealth rights from Elizabeth Sheinkman at PFD. US and Canadian rights have been sold to Peter Borland at Atria, a division of Simon & Schuster, and Italian rights were pre-empted by Longanesi. The book will be published in the UK in spring 2026. 

Each chapter in Time Beings focuses on a different measurement of time, from milliseconds to millennia, and how different species’ perception of time can reflect on our own mortality. Higgins shows how our brains create the sense time is passing, how memory creates our experience of time and how "biological time-pieces allow us to clock duration and the time of day".

Higgins is also the author of Sentient (Pan Macmillan), an exploration of how animals helps us understand what it means to be human, and has worked with National Geographic and The Discovery Channel on wildlife films. She said: “I’m thrilled to be publishing my second book with Allen Lane; they are the perfect fit for Time Beings. Not least because my journey began with the words of one of their authors. To Carlo Rovelli, the mystery of time is ultimately, perhaps, more about ourselves than about the cosmos, Time Beings adds that it is also about every creature on earth. Only by understanding time in our vast and diverse evolutionary family can we comprehend and reconcile what it means for us.”

Stickney added: “‘I read Time Beings during the busiest season of submissions, and yet it immediately stood out to me as a beguiling and beautifully crafted project from a master scientific storyteller. It is impossible to read Jackie Higgins’ spellbinding proposal without losing all sense of time, and without having your perspective shifted as we move from milliseconds to millennia and encounter time through the eyes of blue whales and fireflies, zebra finches and jellyfish. We are incredibly excited to welcome Jackie Higgins to Allen Lane to write this new manifesto for time, guided by life on Earth.”