"In Underland, Macfarlane 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...

Richard Mayhew, a young businessman living in London, helps an injured girl and finds his life changed when he leaves reality and enters the city's underground world of sewers and abandoned subway stations--a world in which the girl he helped is someone of power and nobility.