White Light

‘At once lyrical and exacting, clear-sighted and deeply informed – a beautiful book.’ Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

A fascinating natural history for fans of Underland by Robert Macfarlane, 1492 by Charles Mann, and Leviathan by Philip Hoare. Jack Lohmann reframes our relationship with the natural world, uncovering the many lives – and deaths – of phosphorus.

In 1842, Darwin’s beloved botany professor, Reverend John Stevens Henslow, discovered the miraculous potential of phosphorus as a fertiliser. He hardly imagined that his countrymen would soon be grinding the bones of dead soldiers and mummified Egyptian cats to fertilise farms. Nor that his discovery would spawn a global mining industry, changing diets, lifestyle, and the face of the planet forever.

Journeying across the flat expanses of Henslow’s Suffolk to far-flung Nauru, an island stripped of its life force by this ravenous young industry, Lohmann sifts through the Earth’s geological layers and eras, exploring our strained relationship with a life-giving element. Bold, lyrical, genre-defying, White Light invites us to renew our broken relationship not just with the earth, but with our own death – and the life it brings after us.