The Book of Unconformities, Speculations on Lost Time

*From the author of the acclaimed* Insectopedia comes a powerful exploration of history, loss, and the absences that permeate the present

When his two sisters died suddenly within a few weeks of each other, Hugh Raffles reached for rocks, stones, and other seemingly solid objects as anchors in a world unmoored, ways to make sense of these events through stories far larger than his own.

Drawing on history, anthropology, geology, and ten years of field research, this moving and profound meditation is grounded in stories of stones: Neolithic stone circles, Icelandic lava, mica from a Nazi concentration camp, petrified whale blubber from Svalbard, marble prized by Manhattan's indigenous Lenape, and the Greenlandic meteorites that arrived in an exuberant New York City in 1897 accompanied by six adventurous Inughuit travelers.

Stone, it turns out, is not only the most philosophical of substances--the material that forces a reckoning with time--it is also deeply human in its entanglements. As Raffles follows these fundamental objects, unearthing he events they have engendered, he finds them losing their solidity, becoming as willful, capricious, and indifferent as fate itself.