A few weeks ago, I got to hold a preview copy of my third book, LIFE BEYOND MEASURE, in my hands. I marveled at the stunning cover, which I can unveil to you all today. I felt the singular joy that comes from experiencing a long-gestating idea as a physical object, with heft and texture and pages to be turned. And I’m excited about the imminent moment when everyone else can hold that object themselves. The book will be published on April 6 in the U.S. and on April 29 in the U.K.

It’s available to pre-order right now (US link; UK link)!

LIFE BEYOND MEASURE is the culmination of four decades spent loving the natural world and of two decades spent writing about it. The interests I’ve cultivated, the values I’ve developed, and the skills I’ve honed: I poured them all into this book, which the incredible author Emily St John Mandel described as “no less than a biography of life itself.” At a moment when the living world has been deeply imperiled, I wanted to make my biggest, boldest attempt at showing why it matters—why it all matters, and especially the parts that lie outside our normal experiences.

The book, then, is about life at every possible scale. It’s about what it’s like to be as large as a whale or as small as a bacterium, to repeatedly travel across the world like a migrating bird or to be rooted in place like a tree, or to live barely a few months like some coral reef fish or to endure for millennia like a bristlecone pine. It’s about the layered nature of life: how living beings evolve astonishing new materials out of simple building blocks; how they gain new powers by swarming together in groups; and how groups can evolve into new kinds of indi­viduals. It’s about scales of influence: how beavers can make wetlands, how bacteria can remake a planet, and how thoughtless actions can unmake both.

This is the first book I’ve written that encompasses the entirety of the living world. It features animals, yes, including fireflies that put on transcendentally beautiful synchronous lightshows, bar-tailed godwits that flap nonstop across the world’s largest ocean, tiny insects that skate across the surface of the ocean, and hagfish with their bizarre, ethereal slime. But the book’s protagonists also include everything else—the world’s largest, tallest, and oldest plants; the mysterious category-defying nature of lichens; the underground fungi that allowed greenery to carpet the world; protists whose sophisticated behaviors are programmed into the shape of their single cells; and bacteria that are large enough to tug with tweezers.

While this book is grander than my previous two, it shares much of the same DNA. I CONTAIN MULTITUDES was a call to appreciate the invisible microbes that profoundly influence our lives. AN IMMENSE WORLD was a call to appreciate the imperceptible worlds that surround us and that other animals can sense. Both books were about understanding nature to its fullest extent. Both argued that doing so was crucial for our custodianship of the world and ourselves. LIFE BEYOND MEASURE expands on those themes in every possible direction. I chose the stories within it to defamiliarize us with a world we thought we understood, and make us reconsider familiar concepts like individuality, lifespans, migration, and movement. I crafted the whole package to give us new ways of thinking about nature, the risks it faces, and our responsibilities towards it. I wrote every page to induce awe and wonder (and as with the rest of my life, I did so without any use of generative AI, whatsoever).

The wonderful cover really captures the book’s spirit. It’s very hard to convey the concept of scale in an image that, in itself, is captivating. After many iterations involving a big whale and a small fish, Tyler Comrie, went with this beautiful single image of an Anna’s hummingbird (which, to be clear, I did not take; it’s by Samuel Choy). I love that the tight crop makes this very familiar backyard bird seem almost alien, that the texture of each feature invites the reader to look more closely, that there seems to be a whole new world reflected in the bird’s eye, and that the vivid colors hint at its stunning iridescence—a phenomenon that’s entirely about scale. As I write in the book, to look at the gleaming plumage of a hummingbird “is to peer down through eight orders of magnitude into the nanometer realm.” So it is with the cover.

As for what’s within the cover, I’m grateful to several esteemed friends and colleagues whose descriptions match what I hoped the text would accomplish.

“A tour de force. Life Beyond Measure is an invitation to transcend the limits of our bodies and enter a dazzling world of animals and plants that defies all expectation. Ed Yong’s uncanny ability to break down the walls between us and the rest of nature has left me transformed.”
—Amy Tan, author of The Backyard Bird Chronicles

“Ed Yong reveals our fellow Earth dwellers in ways so mind-twisting they border on psychedelia. A fully formed wasp smaller than an amoeba. Bacteria so big you can see one with bare eyes. Plants that secrete appetite suppressants to foil hungry insects. This book amazes like no other I’ve read. Yong is the perfect ambassador to the improbable wonderland of nature freed from the perceptual boxes we humans typically confine it to. His writing is clear, clever, vivid, the science set alight by his enthusiasm—for the unseen, the unimagined, and the unappreciated (Yong’s passage about hagfish slime deserves a Pulitzer all its own).”
—Mary Roach, author of Stiff

“Utterly extraordinary. Yong’s spectacular new book is not just a mesmerizing examination of the wonders of life on Earth; it’s no less than a biography of life itself.”
—Emily St. John Mandel, author of Exit Party

“I read Life Beyond Measure with reverence and an unmitigated sense of awe, feeling the world expanding around me with every page. Ed Yong has written a gorgeous, profound book in which life comes forth in its sublime complexity to remind us of how modest yet precious our own individual existence is. With its unusual combination of erudition, heart, and humor, Life Beyond Measure sets a new standard in nature writing.”
—Hernan Diaz, author of Trust

We’re still half a year from publication, and I’ll say more about how to support the book and where you might catch me on the eventual book tour. In the meantime, I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering LIFE BEYOND MEASURE (or requesting the book from your local library). Of all the things that people can do to support authors, pre-ordering is arguably the most impactful, and has a disproportionate influence on a book’s ultimate success. Here are the links for pre-ordering in the US and the UK; I personally prefer to support local indie bookstores wherever possible.

Thanks for your support. And here’s a little teaser for the next newsletter where I’ll show you what I saw during a recent trip to Brazil.