A Letter to Layla: Travels to Our Deep Past and Near Future

Here's the advance notice for my new book, A Letter to Layla: Travels to our Deep Past and Near Future, due out with Text Publishing on 29th September, 2020.

It's been more than five years in the making, and I'm engaged in the final edits before printing. It's very exciting to see it taking form in the real world.

Put it on your wishlist at Text Publishing

How might the origins of our species inform the way we think about our planet? At a point of unparalleled crisis, can human ingenuity save us from ourselves?

Much-loved writer Ramona Koval travels the globe in a quest to find answers and encounters the unexpected. She meets an eminent paleo-archaeologist over a two million-year-old skull in the Republic of Georgia, encounters the next generation of robots in Berlin, joins a transhumanist festival against death in California and explores an ice-age cave in Southern France, speaking with the world’s leading authority on cave art.

And throughout these and other adventures she returns to her ever-engaging granddaughter Layla, whose development in infancy spurs Koval to find out what makes us human, what separates us from the other apes.

Filled with insightful and revealing exchanges with scientists and writers whose knowledge of the past and visions for the future could hold the key to our next evolution, A Letter to Layla will surprise and delight in equal measure.