Halliday's 'dazzling' book on ancient super-continent goes to Allen Lane

Allen Lane has signed All the World by evolutionary biologist Thomas Halliday, author of Otherlands (Penguin Press). 

Laura Stickney, publishing director, bought UK and Commonwealth rights from Catherine Clarke at the Felicity Bryan Agency. Allen Lane in the UK will publish the book in hardback in autumn 2025. North American rights have sold to Hilary Redmon at Random House.

“All the World will be a dazzling, lyrical biography of the lost world of Pangaea, the Earth’s last great super-continent,” Allen Lane said. “Pangaea was the stage on which some of the most crucial and transformative episodes in the history of life took place: it was where mammals originated, where insects took flight, where seeds first appeared, where dinosaurs evolved. Transformations that, as Thomas Halliday explains, owes to its unique geography.

“In the same way that Otherlands brought recent discoveries from the field of palaeobiology to vivid life, his new book will introduce readers to ‘palaeobiogeography’—a subject that explores how geography shapes the evolution of life. All the World will be the story of a lost land, how it eventually ruptured and was separated by sea—and how we came to learn of its existence. Above all, it will reveal that the course of natural history cannot be separated from the earth on which it treads.”

Halliday is a palaeobiologist and evolutionary biologist living in London. He holds an honorary fellowship at the University of Birmingham, and is an associate editor of the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology. His first book, Otherlands (Penguin) about the history of earth, was a Sunday Times bestseller in hardback and paperback, a Waterstones Book of the Month, Foyles Non-fiction Book of the Year, longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and Richard Jeffries Award, and highly commended in the Wainwright Prize.

Halliday said: “Pangaea lasted for more than 150 million years, and was the stage on which many crucial events in the history of life played out. As more than just a rearrangement of the map, I’m excited that Allen Lane has given me the chance to explore the impacts of this connected world on the course that life took, and the legacies it leaves today.”

Stickney said: “We are thrilled to have signed a new book from Thomas Halliday, one of the most enchanting storytellers of the Earth’s past. Pangaea has a mythic hold on our imagination, the last time we were all connected, and this subject will enable him to draw on the same powers of imagination and complete command of a novel discipline that made Otherlands so mesmerising. In this book Thomas will show that natural history cannot be separated from the Earth we live on—a truth that reinforces our ancestral connection to this planet, as well as the ways that the past shapes our present and future.”

Clarke added: “The huge success of Thomas’ brilliant debut book Otherlands was due in no small part to the publishing team at Penguin Press. I am delighted that the same team will be publishing All the World, another enchanting journey into Earth’s deep past.”