Volcanic eruptions

The early Greek inhabitants of Sicily peered into Etna’s crater and declared the volcano to be full of monsters. Its ‘impenetrable darkness’ reminded Coleridge of his opium addiction. Helena Attlee, whose hugely enjoyable The Land where Lemons Grow (2014) won acclaim, brings to her portrait of Etna a softer, more admiring, yet respectful, eye. Unpicking its geological and human history and a landscape ‘cobbled together from the expressions of the Earth’s unrest’ became for her a way of returning to the very beginnings of life. Mount Etna, almost 3,500 metres in height, is Europe’s biggest volcano and one of the most active in the world, grumbling and spewing for many

Caspar Henderson writes beguiling books about the natural world, full of eyecatching detail and plangent commentary. His Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st-century Bestiary came out in 2012. A Book of Noises is a worthy companion – a pursuit of auditory wonders, a paean to the act of listening and a salute to silence. Item: the music of the spheres. (The planets’ orbits, proving unideal and elliptical, suggested to the musically minded astronomer Johannes Kepler an appropriately sad, minor-keyed leitmotif for the Earth, where, he felt, misery and famine held sway’.) Item: the world’s loudest sound. (The asteroid Chicxulub that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago; also an