Dawkins’ Genetic Book of the Dead goes to Head of Zeus 

Head of Zeus has signed Richard Dawkins’ The Genetic Book of the Dead, in which The Selfish Gene (OUP) author “explores the untapped potential of DNA to transform and transcend our understanding of evolution”.

Chairman Anthony Cheetham acquired world all language rights directly from the author, for publication in hardback and e-book on 12th October 2023. Head of Zeus previously also published Dawkins’ Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution in November 2021. 

The publisher’s synopsis of The Genetic Book of the Dead reads: “How much do we really know about our past? From the bestselling author of The Selfish Gene comes a revolutionary, vividly illustrated book that unlocks the door to a past more vivid, nuanced and fascinating than anything we have ever seen.

“In the future, a zoologist presented with a hitherto unknown animal will be able to read its body and its genes as detailed descriptions of the world its ancestors inhabited. This ‘book of the dead’ would uncover the remarkable ways in which animals have overcome obstacles, adapted to their environments and, again and again, developed remarkably similar ways of finding solutions to life’s problems.”

Dawkins, a fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Society of Literature, said: “I’m sure I’ll never write another edition of The Selfish Gene. But The Genetic Book of the Dead, while being a totally new book, is aimed at the same audience of the general reader and, simultaneously, professional biologists. 

“Following Head of Zeus’s tradition of beautiful books that readers will want to possess rather than merely download, it is lavishly illustrated with photographs and the artwork of Jana Lenzová, illustrator of Flights of Fancy. The Genetic Book of the Dead offers a whole new way of looking at life. 

“My thesis is that the body and genome of every living creature is a work of literature, a book describing the set of environments in which its ancestors lived. The zoologist of the future will fluently decipher superimposed scripts that today we only glimpse through a glass darkly. 

“As with The Selfish Gene, the last chapter has a sting in the tail, in this case the novel and provocative thesis that our gene pool can be seen as a teeming society of co-operative viruses.”

Cheetham commented: “I’m very proud to publish Richard Dawkins’ most important work of popular science since The Ancestor’s Tale in 2004. It follows hard on the heels of the huge success of Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution, which HoZ published last year and has sold in 17 different languages.”