Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

"This is an amazing book. It opened up a whole new world that I knew nothing about. Well, I knew a bit because some farmers do talk about the fungal roots beneath the soil, but I didn’t know enough. It’s really interesting. It’s a complex subject and he does navigate through it deftly. The book is fairly accessible, I’d say, and utterly absorbing. There’s a whole thing called the ‘wood wide web.’ The illustrations in the book are lovely and there’s a fantastic diagram of a tree and it’s got all these roots that go down and have a symbiotic relationship with these fungal things. I’m really simplifying this—if Merlin reads this, he’ll have a fit—but basically, the fungi and the roots of the tree have a symbiotic relationship and they then ‘communicate’ with other trees. So yes, there is more to mushrooms than you ever thought possible."

"Merlin is a 32-year-old mycologist. This is his first book. He uses fungi to demonstrate the entangledness of everything in the natural world. For him, no questions are out of bounds. There are no canonical principles which cannot and should not be interrogated. And he approaches it with an effervescent, child-like enthusiasm. When I say child-like, I’m giving one of the highest possible compliments. I hope that follows from what I was saying about Patrick Barkham’s book. There’s a feeling of wonder about all of Sheldrake’s sentences which would disarm the most hardened cynic. Yet he’s a very serious scientist. Wonder and scholarship need one another desperately. “This is the true Enlightenment spirit—a spirit of unfettered scepticism” Excitingly, he demonstrates that our usual categories for filing information about the natural world must be scrapped. Fungi confound all our metaphors. However much we think we have understood, this book will make us realise how much we haven’t. It’s a subversive, samizdat deconstruction of our old, staid, epistemologies. After reading it you’ll think, ‘The world is a massively more exciting and colourful and charismatic place than I thought.’ I think that Merlin’s and his father’s work are both characterised by a refusal to take anything at all for granted. This is the true Enlightenment spirit—a spirit of unfettered scepticism. It’s an attitude which proceeds from the idea that the world is much bigger and more complex than any of our preconceptions might suggest, and so all available tools—from gas chromatography to iambic hexameters to altered states of consciousness—have to be used to try to understand any of it. The business of trying to understand how fungal mycelium—or anything—works is an enterprise so audacious that, in order to make any progress, you have to be not only a mycologist, but a physicist, a poet, a musician, a human being, and no doubt lots of other things, too."

"Yes. This is an outstanding science book, actually. And again: who would imagine you’d enjoy a doorstopper of a book about fungi? He goes through everything you need to know about fungi: he talks about truffles, about psychedelic mushrooms, about yeast and alcohol, penicillin. All those thing are based on fungi, of course. He even makes the case that life wouldn’t have to moved onto land without fungi, because it was some kind of symbiotic relationship between plants and fungi that brought the first land-dwelling plants, in a way—the land was colonised by plants before the animals, and we descended from those animals. “We’re looking for rigorous science, topics that interest us, where the basis for what’s being discussed is highly scientific” He also talks about bioremediation, how fungi could well digest plastics, which would be tremendous. And the ‘wood wide web’, where trees are connected underground through fungal mycelium networks—if one tree is injured, say, it sends a signal to the fungal network to say there’s something toxic, and the other trees can respond. I thought that was fascinating. So, again, great science and really well written. Definitely. They sent me 267 books, all those that were nominated. We did an initial cut to get the numbers down, but there are a huge number of good books on interesting topics. Perhaps lockdown encouraged all these writers to finally get those books done. Who knows? Certainly it’s been a great year for science books. I have. I mean, you quickly see what works and what doesn’t. A great opener is always good. Strong examples. Make it interesting. Obviously that’s the key thing: all six of these books are really interesting. They got on to the shortlist because we all wanted to read them in detail. So that’s the key criterion, and they certainly all fulfil that. It will be a very hard job to pick a winner, because they’re all excellent reads."