This was a fascinating examination of islands and cities across thousands of years all lost to flooding from all sorts of reasons like sea levels changing, tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcanoes.

This was well researched and I found it easy to read. What really kept my attention throughout was how Nunn gave equal weight and importance to the scientific evidence of this lost lands he did to the oral and traditional histories of indigenous peoples who have passed stories down for generations of floods and rising sea levels. He didn't dismiss these stories as just fanciful inventions, but gave them time and examinations to find the kernels of truth in them.

I particularly liked the end note of hope. Humanity has dealt with tragedies and natural disasters for thousands of years, and we have endured. Humankind has adapted, and continued on regardless of what Mother Nature throws at us.

Thank you NetGalley and Bloomsbury for this arc.

This is an amazing book. It covers how long the collective human memory potentialy is.. Long before the written world, humans passed on stories and eyewitness accounts to teach their children and grandchildren, etc,,,, how to survive, by telling them what they had witnessed. Some stories can now be dated, to a degre,e 1000's of years into ther past. Myths have grown out of some to explain natural events. Gods have been blamed, just like today.
I recall having heard about these memories, but this book takes it even further and explains it very well in plain English. Fascinating read!

Thank you to NetGalley for this e-ARC. I'm conflicted about this book. While I did find the content of it to be fascinating, I just found myself to be a bit bored reading it. It's definitely one of those nonficiton books that would need many breaks between reading for the content to really get to me. Overall, 3/5 stars because i did find it super interesting!!

Engaging and full of surprises.

Author, a scientist himself, combines knowledge from many sources and disciplines - geography, geology, archeology, spoken history, to name just a few - into a coherent and original tale of sunken lands, real and imaginary ones. Underwater archeology is far less known than its terrestrial kind, so diving into this topic was fascinating for me.

Despite being a little textbook-ish, it is very well written and easy to follow. And in the time of climate crisis and rising sea levels it is worth knowing how our ancestors managed to survive similar situations.

Thanks to the publisher, Bloomsbury USA, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

4.5 Stars

I am grateful to Bloomsberry USA for sending me an advanced copy of this book for review.

This was a very niche non-fiction read that I didn't know I needed to read. Submerged lands, cities, and lost civilizations are fascinating, and this book opened my eyes to so much more. I love history, but this particular field is not something that I've ever given much thought, so this was such a good read.

I enjoyed the structure of the book which made it easy to read from cover to cover and feel less like a text book. We start off with looking at Atlantis, a mythological sunken city, and then we move on to real historical places, then modern day locations. This book touches on historic moments when areas of land sank in minutes, and compared to gradual and recurring incidents of the sea reclaiming land. Then we touch on modern concerns with rising sea levels. Altogether very informative and well laid out.

I enjoyed this and I would recommend this to people interested in history and geography.

This is an example of interesting, dynamic, and compelling nonfiction that feels like fiction. I have always been a little obsessed with myths like Atlantis, and for someone to seriously separate the fact from the fiction when it comes to the history of the submerged was like Christmas come early for me. As climate change has us witnessing the gradual but unstoppable rise of our oceans the world over, I find myself thinking of what future societies will think of all the submerged civilizations they will inevitably find. So much of human history now rests beneath the waves, and Patrick Nunn does a deft job of presenting his readers with the reality versus the myths.

DNF simply because I didn't have enough time with the ARC (and/or had too many other items out at the same time). This seemed easy to understand, at least the first few chapters that I made it through. More maps would have been nice; in absence of maps, this would make a great audiobook (ideally with a companion PDF with more maps.) :D

I love this book so much! Not going to lie, I immediately went to Atlantis when I heard submerged cities but Worlds in Shadow is so fascinating and well written.

I thought from its description that Worlds in Shadow: Submerged Lands in Science, Memory and Myth would be primarily about those eerily lost places that seem to persist only in a nearby people’s folklore — and to a degree, those stories are here: from a Polynesian tale of a guardian shark who thrashed its tail against an island’s underwater support pillar, causing it to topple over, to the Breton conteurs of North-West France who still travel village to village telling of the fabulous lost city of Ys, long submerged in the ocean — but as much as researcher and author Patrick Nunn refers to such tales as jumping off points, this is really about the science of how islands do, sometimes, suddenly appear and disappear, and moreso, how humans throughout history have dealt with ever-changing coastlines; an issue pressing for our times as a warming Earth threatens coastal dwellers all over our “drowning world”. I am personally more interested in people's stories than the geological science that could get a little dry here (even if so much of the cataclysmic processes were shockingly new to me; I did naively think that the ground beneath my feet was more solid and enduring than it is), but I can’t fault a book for not being what I expected. Thorough, ultimately interesting and credible, Worlds in Shadow taught me much.

In Worlds in Shadow the author and scientist, Patrick Nunn, explains the fact and the fiction behind submerged cities. We all have heard and wondered about those mysterious places at some point in our lives - I’m sure everyone is familiar with the legend of Atlantis (spoiler alert: a myth, as Nunn proves in the book). Nunn, a Professor of Geography at the University of the Sunshine Coast, specializes in the effects that rising sea-levels have on geology and coastal areas, and that’s what is the main focus in this book. Nunn talks about the fact that some of the stories of submerged cities survived hundreds of generations and while many of them are just that, stories, some of them are at least based in truth, and he provides many examples. The one that stuck with me the most is Atlit Yam, an ancient city near the cost of Israel that is dated to more than 8000 years old and was probably flooded by a 10-story-high tsunami.

Nunn focuses also on even older geological events that led us to where we are, like how the oceans were created and how the tectonic plates moved across the eras. In the last chapters, he explains what’s going to happen next, using the example of the city of Nadi. Nadi was being constantly flooded and although the authorities tried many things - more drainage, river dredges - the problem continued. Sadly, the true cause of the flooding, climate change, doesn’t have an easy fix. The author says that while we can’t know for sure what the future holds, we can try to fight it, and I found that message very hopeful.

Overall, although I did at times find my mind wandering when faced with so many geological and historical facts, World in Shadows is an important and fascinating read.

I am an absolute sucker for non-fiction that tackles obscure science and myth. This book was interesting, and I really enjoy the concept of how science, history, and myth generally interact - who doesn't love legends of Atlantis? It's a fascinating concept, but ultimately I think Nunn could have done a bit more. Nunn's writing was strong enough that the repetitiveness of the book got to the extent I wonder if the final published version will have a heavier edit?

All of that said, I did enjoy the subject matter, and I always enjoy books that talk about how myths always come from an element of reality - even if they become reality themselves in their own way. I also think any reminder that climate change is a very real and on point discussion point right now.

ARC received from NetGalley for an honest review.

I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The version I read had a ton of formatting issues that I'm sure will be resolved in the final editions, so I didn't factor them into my rating but mentioning here just in case.

This was an interesting work that examines how science, history, and mythology intersect on the topic of submerged lands. Not only was the topic interesting, but it was pretty timely as well, considering climate change and rising sea levels and such.

I didn't think the writing was the most engaging of any nonfiction I've read, but it wasn't nearly the worst either.

In Worlds in Shadow, author Patrick Nunn explores lands that have been submerged by water, with a particular focus on the stories told about them over time and how those stories might reveal some truth about long-ago occurrences. He notes early on that the three sources for learning about such lands are “science, memory, and myth.” That last may come as surprise, but Nunn warns us that “if we … dismiss things like memory and myth because we do not know how to interrogate them, then we are likely to end up with an incomplete picture of the past … each of these three information sources is potentially valid.”

Of course, one can’t simply accept myths at face value (or even memory for that matter as we continue to learn how unreliable it is). Nunn notes that “the challenge … is to peel way the layers of embellishment to expose an empirical core,” recognizing as well that “this is not always a straightforward task; indeed some myths may not have such a core.” He offers up the legends of Atlantis as just one such example.

He covers a number of now-lost lands, ranging from small islands to coastal cities to much larger, continent-sized, landmasses, and also explains the various means by which such submersions can occur: slow subsidence, rising sea levels, tsunamis amongst them. Given the different methods, some losses were startlingly fast and others gar more gradual, over decades or more.

It's an interesting topic, and Nunn’s explanations are clear and full, but I felt the book suffered from repetition, both over its entirety and at times from page to page. Several times I wrote in my notes “repetitive” or “really repetitive” and at one point notes “literally just told us this on the prior page.” A more stringent editing would have greatly helped I believe. Generally, Nunn makes a strong case for his argument about myth as a source of reality, though I didn’t think a few examples were weaker than others. His turn to what we can expect in the future based on climate change makes for a nice topical connection, and despite its conciseness is duly alarming. A solid work that could have used with some streamlining, but still offers up some fascinating exploration