Includes bibliographical references (pages 447-464) and index.

First chamber -- Descending -- Part I. Seeing (Britain). Burial (Mendips, Somerset) ; Dark matter (Boulby, Yorkshire) ; The understorey (Epping Forest, London) -- Second chamber -- Part II. Hiding (Europe). Invisible cities (Paris) ; Starless rivers (The Carso, Italy) ; Hollow land (Slovenian highlands) -- Third chamber -- Part III. Haunting (The north). Red dancers (Lofotens, Norway) ; The edge (Andya, Norway) ; The blue of time (Kulusuk, Greenland) ; Meltwater (Knud Rasmussen Glacier, Greenland) ; The hiding place (Olkiluoto, Finland) ; Surfacing.

In Underland, Macfarland delivers his masterpiece: an epic exploration of the Earth's underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself. He takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind. Traveling through "deep time" - the dizzying expanses of geologic time that stretch away from the present - he moves from the birth of the universe to a post-human future, from the prehistoric art of Norwegian sea caves to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, from Bronze Age funeral chambers to the catacomb labyrinth below Paris, and from the underground fungal networks through which trees communicate to a deep-sunk "hiding place" where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come.