Zone of the Marvellous: In Search of the Antipodes

In the tradition of Dava Sobel and Longitude, award-winning writer Martin Edmond uses his extraordinary intellectual breadth and imaginative reach to elegantly and lucidly execute his most ambitious project to date - the history of 4,000 years of the Western imagination and the Antipodes, Great Southern Land, Zone of the Marvellous. Australia and New Zealand were imagined for thousands of years before they became real. From Plato's Atlantis to Dante's Mount Purgatory, from Sinbad the Sailor to Abel Tasman, travellers, writers, mapmakers, charlatans have dreamt of a fabled land on the far side of the world. In this far-ranging cultural history Martin Edmond traverses vast territories of time and space, of human fortitude and imagination.