Entangled Life
by Merlin Sheldrake
Summary
Fungi are neither plants nor animals but a kingdom of their own, mostly invisible, mostly unstudied, and, Sheldrake's book argues with mounting delight, quietly running the place. The visible mushroom is a fruiting afterthought; the organism is mycelium, branching threads that permeate soil, wood and bodies, and the book's project is to make that hidden network vivid.
The chapters each open a door. The mycorrhizal partnerships by which fungi wire themselves into plant roots, trading minerals for sugar, ninety percent of plants depending on the deal, and the wood wide web hypothesis, forests linked underground into commerce and possibly communication, which Sheldrake, who did his Cambridge doctorate on these networks in Panamanian rainforest, presents with a researcher's care about how much the metaphors can carry. Lichens, fungi in permanent partnership with algae, whose composite nature broke biology's categories a century early. The zombie ants steered by Ophiocordyceps; truffles and the chemistry of desire; psilocybin, its renaissance in psychiatry, and the dizzying question of what it means that a mould makes molecules that reorganise human consciousness; yeasts, humanity's oldest employees, fermenting the book's own closing pages, which Sheldrake wrote after growing oyster mushrooms on a copy and drinking cider pressed from apples of a tree grown on Isaac Newton's.
He is a rare stylist, precise and slightly hallucinatory, fitted to organisms that dissolve the boundary between individual and network.
Around three hundred and sixty pages.
Best for readers who want their sense of how life is organised genuinely rearranged, by the book that made fungi glamorous.
Historical Context & Significance
Entangled Life won the Royal Society prize in 2021 and the Wainwright Prize for conservation writing, sat on bestseller lists through the pandemic and became a genuine cultural event: the book is commonly credited with mainstreaming the fungal turn, the surge of mycological enthusiasm, exhibitions, documentaries and startup mycelium materials that followed, and Merlin Sheldrake, touring with his fermented props, became the kingdom's ambassador.
Judging chair Luke O'Neill called it science writing at its very best; reviewers reached for psychedelic comparisons the subject licensed. Scientifically it has worn its success carefully: the wood wide web enthusiasms it reported with caveats were later contested in the literature, and Sheldrake's own caveats aged better than some of the coverage they failed to restrain.
He works with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, mapping the planet's mycorrhizal commons, the research programme the book effectively fundraised; a lavish illustrated edition followed, and Sheldrake went on to present the giant screen documentary Fungi: Web of Life. Fungi's shelf, empty for decades, is now crowded, and this book opened it.