RosettaBooks Publishes Deep Past, A New Novel From Bestselling Science Writer Eugene Linden

An array of bones discovered in the far steppes of Kazak; a mining operation comprised of a dangerously unstable alliance between Russian, Canadian and Kazakhstan interests; and a young woman scientist who is willing to risk her reputation to uncover a story five million years old. Deep Past: A Novel by Eugene Linden (RosettaBooks/May 14, 2019/$25.99), hailed by bestselling novelist and journalist Douglas Preston as "an extraordinary novel on so many levels," challenges our ideas about intelligence, evolution and the impact of climate change.

Eugene Linden has long been on the forefront of those ideas reporting for Time, National Geographic, and Foreign Affairs, as well as with his award-winning and critically praised books including The Winds of Change, The Ragged Edge of the World, The Parrot's Lament, Silent Partners, and The Future in Plain Sight. With his experience in not only reporting the news but also analyzing its implications, he has created a thriller that seamlessly weaves cutting-edge science as it collides with the realpolitik of nations, institutions, and ambitions. What would it mean if sometime in the deep past evolution had produced a non-human intelligence equivalent to ours in its ability to plan and deal with complexity, but utterly different in the way it operated? And what if the message from the past also turned out to be a warning about what we face now: the disastrous impacts of climate change? Mixing science and fantastical extrapolation, Linden opens up a conversation about the ways in which science, the academy, and human industry both reveal and conceal the story of the earth each for their own aims-and at a price.

Anthropologist Claire Knowland is happily leading a team of researchers studying elephants when her proposal for additional funding brings her into an unexpected bargain: the funder will give the funds only if Claire agrees to take over a pet project of his that is leaderless in the steppes of Kazakhstan. She agrees knowing it might be a challenge-what she knows about the behavior of elephants is unlikely to help in the arid research camp.

When a Westerner working on the mining project comes to her asking for her opinion on an unusual find in the midst of their operations, she agrees to take a look hoping it might be what her new team needs-the proof they've been looking for in their digs. Instead what she gets is an array of bones of a species that has never been known to be in that region, arranged in what can only be seen as astonishingly purposeful fashion-and something for which her knowledge of elephants turns out to be critical.

The discovery threatens to overturn long-held notions in the scientific world, but Claire's efforts to bring it to light run a gauntlet of entrenched views in the academic world as well as geopolitical havoc in an already unstable region. Claire, a Russian geologist on the mining operation who has secrets of his own that could put them all in danger and the team members from the research project who join them, will find themselves at the center of what turns a deadly gambit over a five-million-year-old message about climate change and survival.

Deep Past is a thriller that delivers not only the requisite veracity and tension but delivers a final message of unsurpassing beauty and emotive power. Available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook wherever books are sold.