Lost Wonders is available now from Picador (Pan Macmillan)

Shortlisted for the 2024 Richard Jeffries Prize for Nature Writing and nominated for the ZSL/Clarivate Award.

In Lost Wonders Tom Lathan tells ten powerful stories of species that have lived, died out and been declared extinct since the turn of the twenty-first century.

In a series of fascinating encounters with subjects that are now nowhere to be found on Earth – from giant tortoises to minuscule snails the size of sesame seeds, from ocean-hopping trees to fish that wag their tails like puppies – Tom Lathan brings these lost wonders briefly back to life and gives us a tantalising glimpse of what we have lost within our own lifetime.

Drawing on the personal recollections of the people who studied these species, as well as those who tried but ultimately failed to save them, and with beautiful illustrations, Lost Wonders is an intimate portrait of the species that have only recently vanished from our world and an urgent warning to hold on all the more tightly to those now slipping from our grasp.

Illustrated by Claire Kohda

Reviews

A best book of the year in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Institute

'Superb storytelling . . . an exhilarating and vital book'
- Charles Foster, author of Cry of the Wild

‘A beautifully crafted elegy for the lost species of our age’
- Kate Teltscher, author of Palace of Palms

’Not just a timely epitaph . . . but a celebration of their existence’
- Stephen Moss, author of Ten Birds That Changed the World'

‘A poignant and exhaustively researched story of the 6th extinction’
- Ross Barnett, author of The Missing Lynx

‘Timely, elegiac' - Daily Mail