Earth’s life story is written in its rocks. They are time machines, which can transport us over billions of years through the metamorphoses by which our planet was forged. How to Read a Rock combines a guide to deciphering these sagas of our planet’s past with case studies of the rocks and landscapes that best tell those tales. Using stones as storytellers, it narrates the prehistoric forces of shifting continents; considers how manufactured rocks are transforming Earth’s geology; travels with space probes to distant moons and planets; and asks what our geological past can predict of our future.

Exceptional photographs and infographics illustrate a text from one of the world’s great geological storytellers, revealing layer by layer the secrets written in stone.