Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet

Urban explorer Hunt serves as a genial guide to the clandestine communities, unexpected lives, and hidden histories existing in subterranean realms. More travelogue than history, the book allows the reader to follow Hunt as he traverses the catacombs of Paris, ochre mines of Australia, underground cities of Turkey, and subway tunnels of New York City, in the last locale searching for a famed graffiti artist’s elusive work. Along the way, Hunt introduces readers to fascinating people obsessed with the underground, including the flamboyant 19th-century French photographer Nadar, who documented Paris’s catacombs using one of the first artificial lighting systems in the history of photography, and English engineer William Lyttle, “the Mole Man of Hackney,” discovered in the early 2000s to have been secretly tunneling beneath his northeast London house for decades. At times, Hunt’s claims for his subject’s importance can be grandiose (“Underground worlds... have guided how we think of ourselves and given shape to our humanity”), but he is always entertaining, and this brisk work, rife with intriguing characters and little-known traditions and communities, will leave many readers wanting to dig deeper into the worlds hiding beneath their feet. Agent: Stuart Krichevsky, Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency. (Feb.)