A Book of Noises - Notes on the Auraculous

Sound shapes our world in invisible but profound ways, and here Caspar Henderson brings his characteristic curiosity, knowledge and sense of wonder to the subject to take us on an exhilarating journey through the heard universe.

A Book of Noises gathers together sounds from the cosmos, the natural world, the human world, and the invented world, and contains quiet pockets of silence. From the vast sound of sand in the desert to the tuneful warble of a songbird, to the meditative resonance of a temple bell and the improvisational melodies of jazz, this is a celebration of all things auricular.


Praise:

"Haunting and captivating... a marvel... Caspar Henderson confirms that, for all its turbulence, this is still "a world alive with good noises". Open your ears" - David Farrier, author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils

"A book of exquisite richness and erudition, dedicated equally to the beautiful strange and the precious ordinary" - Jay Griffiths

"Caspar Henderson's books are a special kind of treasure; I struggle to think of another writer who achieves this combination of scope, intellectual rigour and deep reflection with such grace and style. Don't be deceived by the title - far from being a noisy book, this is a quiet and determined call to listen better" - Helen Jukes

CASPAR HENDERSON has been a journalist and an editor: a contributor to BBC Radio 4, Financial Times, Guardian, Nature, New Scientist and openDemocracy. His debut, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings (Granta, 2012), won the Roger Deakin Award of the Society of Authors and the Jerwood Award of the Royal Society of Literature, and was shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. A New Map of Wonders (Granta) was published in 2017. A Book of Noises will be published by Granta in October 2023. He lives in Oxford.