Fungi connect trees in underground networks, digest rock into soil, and produce the psychoactive compounds that have shaped human culture. Merlin Sheldrake's book explores these organisms that are neither plant nor animal, challenging our assumptions about individuality, intelligence, and life itself. Sheldrake, a biologist who earned his doctorate studying mycorrhizal networks in Panama, writes with infectious wonder about creatures that dissolve boundaries we take for granted. A single fungal organism can extend for miles through soil, connecting the roots of trees in what has been called the Wood Wide Web. Through these networks, trees share nutrients and chemical signals, raising questions about where one organism ends and another begins. Sheldrake examines lichens, those partnerships between fungi and algae that are neither one nor the other; truffles, whose underground fruiting bodies evolved to attract animals that would spread their spores; and the yeasts that ferment bread and wine. He also explores radical mycology, activist efforts to use fungi to clean up pollution and rethink agricultural systems. The book is both a natural history and a philosophical meditation on the limits of the individual self. Readers interested in biology, ecology, or simply in being astonished by the living world will find Sheldrake a knowledgeable and enthusiastic guide.