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An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around by Ed Yong cover

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around

by Ed Yong

$11.97 on AmazonRead our full review

At a glance

Pages480
First published2022
AudienceAdult
ISBN0593133250
Ed Yong

About the Author

Ed Yong

1 book reviewed

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An Immense World

How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around

by Ed Yong

LuvemBooks Verdict

Best for: Readers curious about biology, animal behaviour, ecology, or the philosophy of mind who want serious, rigorously researched science delivered through narrative storytelling rather than textbook exposition — and who will find genuine wonder in discovering how radically different the world looks, sounds, and feels to other creatures.

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An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us is a landmark work of narrative nonfiction by Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist Ed Yong, exploring how each animal on Earth inhabits its own unique sensory reality — its Umwelt — through a sweeping tour of sight, sound, scent, magnetism, electroreception, and more. Winner of both the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the 2023 Royal Society Science Book Prize, the book earns its extraordinary reception through a rare balance of scientific rigour and narrative wonder that works equally well for general readers and those already versed in biology. The key caveat: readers hoping for confident answers about animal consciousness will find that Yong is scrupulously honest about what science cannot yet resolve — the book is as much a meditation on the limits of human knowledge as it is a catalogue of discovery.
Is it worth reading?
For readers drawn to popular science, animal behaviour, ecology, or the philosophy of mind, An Immense World delivers at an unusually high level — critics called it 'dazzling' and 'thrilling,' and the convergence of the Carnegie Medal, the Royal Society Science Book Prize, and a New York Times top-ten designation is rare even within the upper tier of science writing. Oprah Daily described Yong's reporting as 'layered, seasoned with vivid scenes from laboratories and in the field,' and critical coverage consistently praised the book's 'perfect balance of scientific rigor and personal awe.' The one honest caveat is scope: at nearly 480 pages covering dozens of species and sensory systems, readers who prefer tightly focused, single-subject narrative nonfiction may occasionally feel the encyclopaedic breadth weighing against momentum. For curious generalists and science enthusiasts alike, however, it is among the most celebrated popular-science books published in recent years.
Who should read this?
An Immense World is designed for readers who want serious science delivered without the weight of a textbook — those curious about biology, animal behaviour, ecology, or the philosophy of mind who want those subjects braided together through narrative and individual character. Critically, the book functions across a wide spectrum of prior knowledge: it does not require a science background and does not condescend to readers who bring one. It is particularly well-suited to anyone captivated by how the living world works from the inside out, and to readers who enjoy popular science by authors like Jonathan Balcombe or Frans de Waal.
Similar books
Readers who responded to An Immense World's sense of wonder about animal inner lives will find similar rewards in several books on our shelves. Jonathan Balcombe's What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins covers the surprisingly rich cognitive and sensory world of fish with a comparable blend of science and advocacy. Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate applies the same instinct — looking for hidden experience in the living world — to the forest, asking whether trees sense, communicate, and remember. Thomas McNamee's The Inner Life of Cats: The Science and Secrets of Our Mysterious Feline Companions brings a similar curiosity about non-human experience closer to home. For readers who want to stay with Ed Yong specifically, his earlier book I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life applies the same narrative rigour and sense of wonder to the microbial world.
About Ed Yong
Edmund Soon-Weng Yong is a British-American science journalist and author.
What awards did it win?
An Immense World won both the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the 2023 Royal Society Science Book Prize — two of the most prestigious honours in English-language nonfiction and science writing respectively. The New York Times named it one of its ten best books of 2022, a distinction echoed by the Wall Street Journal, Time, People, Slate, and Publishers Weekly. Kirkus Reviews named it one of the best nonfiction books of the century, and it appeared on Barack Obama's list of favourite books of the year. This convergence of critical, popular, and institutional recognition is unusual even within the upper tier of science writing.
How philosophical does it get?
Philosophy of mind runs as a genuine and unresolved thread throughout An Immense World, not merely as window-dressing. Yong engages directly with Thomas Nagel's foundational essay 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' — the argument that subjective experience may be permanently inaccessible from the outside — and refuses to paper over the limits this places on scientific knowledge of animal consciousness. As Yong writes, 'A scientist's explanations about other animals are dictated by the data she collects, which are influenced by the questions she asks, which are steered by her imagination, which is delimited by her senses.' The book is, at its edges, a meditation on the limits of knowledge as much as a catalogue of zoological discovery — a quality that makes it intellectually richer but may sit uncomfortably with readers who want their popular science more declarative.
Summarize this book

Summarize this book

An Immense World is organised around the concept of the Umwelt — a term coined by Baltic German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll to describe the unique sensory bubble each creature inhabits. Ed Yong moves systematically through the animal kingdom's sensory repertoire — sight, sound, scent, touch, magnetism, and electroreception — drawing on field research and laboratory science to reveal how profoundly different the world is depending on who is experiencing it. The cast of animals is wide and surprising: beetles drawn to fire, sea turtles navigating by Earth's magnetic field, fish communicating through electrical pulses, giant squid whose enormous eyes evolved to detect the bioluminescent glow of sperm whales, and crocodiles with facial scales sensitive enough to detect pressure in water. At its philosophical core, the book confronts an honest limit: the human Umwelt inevitably shapes what we can know about any other Umwelt — a constraint Yong neither sidesteps nor despairs over.

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Age & Reading Level

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Adult

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Adult

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Skip if you want popular science that delivers confident conclusions about animal consciousness rather than an honest reckoning with what remains scientifically unresolved.

Editorial Review

Ed Yong's An Immense World is a work of narrative nonfiction that explores the radically different ways animals perceive the world through their senses — from the magnetic navigation of sea turtles to the electrical communications of river fish — organised around the concept of the Umwelt, the unique sensory bubble each creature inhabits. Originally published in 2022 and reissued by Random House Trade Paperbacks in 2023, the book won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Royal Society Science Book Prize, was named one of The New York Times's ten best books of 2022, and appeared on Barack Obama's list of favourite books of the year.…

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Books like An Immense World

Curated picks for readers who enjoyed An Immense World, with our reasoning for each match.

If you liked An Immense World

In our catalogue

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate

Peter Wohlleben

Reveals a hidden sensory and communicative world — trees perceiving and responding to their environment — delivering the same 'the world is stranger than you knew' payoff.

Readers who finished An Immense World still buzzing with the idea that every organism inhabits its own private reality will feel right at home with The Hidden Life of Trees. Peter Wohlleben argues that forests are dense social networks — trees detect light, drought, insect attack, and the chemistry of their neighbours, then respond in ways that look startlingly like communication. The book shares An Immense World's core move: take a creature most people consider passive or simple, then show how rich and active its inner experience actually is. The tone is accessible and personal rather than textbook-dry, and each chapter redraws the reader's mental map of the natural world. Anyone searching 'books like An Immense World about hidden animal or plant senses' will find Wohlleben's forest a logical and rewarding next destination.

In our catalogue

What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins

Jonathan Balcombe

Challenges assumptions about animal perception and intelligence underwater — a natural companion for readers fascinated by An Immense World's fish electroreception and lateral-line chapters.

An Immense World devotes considerable attention to the extraordinary sensory lives of fish — their lateral lines that feel water pressure, their electrical senses, their colour vision that far outstrips our own. What a Fish Knows picks up exactly there, making a sustained case that fish are far more cognitively and perceptually sophisticated than most people assume. Jonathan Balcombe draws on recent research to show that fish learn, remember, use tools, and experience something like social bonds. The book's argument — that our prejudices about 'lower' animals cause us to radically underestimate their inner lives — echoes An Immense World's central theme of Umwelt. If you're searching for 'books similar to An Immense World about animal senses and cognition', What a Fish Knows is a focused, evidence-rich companion that covers territory Yong opens up but doesn't fully explore.

Not your thing?

In our catalogue

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Carl Sagan

If An Immense World felt too zoology-specific, Sagan's classic delivers the same sense of scientific wonder but across physics, astronomy, and the nature of knowledge itself.

Some readers come to An Immense World hoping for broad scientific wonder but find the sustained focus on animal biology narrows the experience for them. If that's you, The Demon-Haunted World is the remedy. Carl Sagan writes with the same infectious conviction that the universe is far stranger and more beautiful than everyday life lets on — but he ranges across astronomy, physics, pseudoscience, and critical thinking rather than staying inside the natural world. The book is fundamentally about how science works as a way of seeing, which rhymes with An Immense World's central argument that different perceptual systems reveal different truths about reality. The prose is warmer and more essayistic, the scope is genuinely cosmic, and the emotional register is one of awe rather than laboratory precision. Readers searching for 'science books like An Immense World but with a wider scope' will find Sagan's candle lights a very different — but equally rewarding — room.