Mountains of Fire

'Gripping ... a love letter to volcanoes and an investigation into all the ways that they have and continue to sustain humanity' THE ECONOMIST 'Wonderful' PETER FRANKOPAN 'Like a thriller ... Oppenheimer is better than good. This is terrific' SPECTATOR 'What the French adventurer Jacques Cousteau was to the hidden world under our seas, Oppenheimer is to the hidden, molten world bubbling under our feet' SUNDAY TIMES 'Beautiful ... bursting with poetry, with storytelling' WERNER HERZOG _ We are made of the same stuff as the breath and cinders of volcanoes. No matter where we live on the planet, these fiery mountains have long shaped the path of humanity. World-famous volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer has worked at the crater's edge in the wildest places on Earth. In Mountains of Fire we join him on hair-singeing adventures, close enough to feel the heat of the lava, from Antarctica to Iceland, to learn how deeply our stories are intertwined with volcanoes. _ 'Full of human feeling and myth ... We can't all travel the globe to risk our lives at the crater's edge, but we have Oppenheimer's prose to get us nearly there' NEW SCIENTIST 'On almost every page of his book ... there is some display of mind-boggling bravado in the face of Earth's pyrotechnics' THE TIMES