Philip Marsden’s Under A Metal Sky was reviewed in the FT Weekend by Anjli Raval, the paper’s management editor and former senior energy correspondent. She considered it alongside Extractive Capitalism, in which Laleh Khalili “shows how everything, from data centres to transportation, depends on extraction”. The books, Raval says, offer alternative ways of understanding the world under our feet; both “encourage us to look below and think again”.

A couple of forthcoming books that I’ve not had a chance to mention here before: Fractured France: A Journey Through a Divided Nation by Andrew Hussey (Granta, £25, September 11); and Ghosts of the Farm: Two Women’s Journeys Through Time, Land & Community by Nicola Chester (Chelsea Green, September 30).

In Fractured France, Hussey, a Liverpool-born cultural historian, travels the length of his adopted homeland, “from the post-industrial north to… the beautiful and complex south, to map the mood and reveal the social, political and economic fault-lines that are shaping the nation today”.

In Ghosts of the Farm, Chester, an award-winning nature writer, tells the story of Miss White, a single woman in the 1940s, who hitched up her caravan to pursue her farming dreams. Reading her diary, the author found many parallels and increasing coincidences and was moved to interrogate her own “farming ghosts”, in those same fields, and during time she spent in Canada as a cowgirl in the late 1980s.