Dust

‘Superb’ Telegraph

‘Marvellous’ New York Review of Books

‘Brilliant’ Sunday Times

‘Eye-opening . . . impressive’ Guardian

‘Powerful’ Nature

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Dust may seem inconsequential, so tiny and mundane as to slip below the threshold of thought. Yet within the next one hundred years, life on Earth will be profoundly changed by heat and drought - and that means dust.

In this ground-breaking book, Jay Owens shows how the modern world is made through both the creation and expulsion of dust. From particle air pollution and burning fossil fuels to land degradation, desertification and nuclear fallout, we find out the immense challenges confronting people and the planet.

With clarity and insight, Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles helps us understand our legacy and discovers that the biggest ideas can be found in the smallest particles.

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Combining history and science, a sweeping look at the smallest substance and the biggest challenges facing people and the planet

Dust is a book with an extraordinary global story to tell, and an ethical argument to advance. Robert Macfarlane

‘Like a detective dusting for fingerprints, Jay Owens masterfully reveals the hidden traces of modernity by following some of its smallest fragments.’ James Vincent, author of Beyond Measure

‘From Mark Kurlansky's Salt and Laura Martin's Tea to Jared Diamond's Guns and Germs and Steel, can we now add geographer Jay Owens's Dust?’ Telegraph