In Sentient, Jackie Higgins assembles a menagerie of zoological creatures – from land, air, sea and all four corners of the globe – to understand what it means to be human.

'Spellbinding . . . More than any other book, [Sentient] has made me think differently about the world this year.' – Financial Times Best Books of the Year

The peacock mantis shrimp can throw a punch that can fracture aquarium walls.

The great grey owl can hear many decibels lower than the human ear.

The star-nosed mole’s miraculous nose allows it to catch worms in as little as 120 milliseconds.

In Sentient we also meet the four-eyed spookfish and its dark vision, the vampire bat and its remarkable powers of touch, as well as the common octopus, the Goliath catfish and the duck-billed platypus. Each zoological marvel illustrates the surprising sensory powers that lie within us and enables us to engage with the world in ways we never knew possible.

'Lyrical and lucid . . . Higgins makes popular science accessible.' – Observer

The first rule of popular science is to reveal the wonder and mystery of the world. For that reason, Sentient, written by photographer and wildlife film-maker Jackie Higgins, is my personal pick of the year -- Simon Ings * New Scientist Best Books of the Year *
Spellbinding . . . More than any other book, [Sentient] has made me think differently about the world this year. -- Alec Russell * Financial Times Best Books of the Year *
Higgins makes popular science accessible. -- Saskia Baron * Observer *
Jackie Higgins’s eye-opening account of the often bizarre or superhuman sensory systems of other animals, from Hades-dwellers to Arctic owls. -- Steven Poole * Telegraph Best New Science Books *
Gripping . . . Thanks to Higgins' flair for storytelling, Sentient successfully informs us about our own senses by exploring those of animals. -- Barbara J. King * TLS *
[An] epic account of how the senses make sense . . . Higgins’s argument, although colourful, is rigorous and focused. She leads us to adopt an entirely unfamiliar way of thinking about the senses. -- Simon Ings * The Times *
Jackie Higgins’s lyrical, literate style will charm you while her book stuns your imagination with strange, other-worldly truths. -- Richard Dawkins
Sentient is a tour de force of popular science, leading the reader on a whistle-stop tour of the natural world, to show the fascinating parallels between animal and human senses. -- Stephen Moss, naturalist and author
Jackie Higgins puts a mirror up to the natural world so we can sense ourselves through our animal relatives. I love this book because it reminds me of our wildness. -- Craig Foster, filmmaker and subject of the Oscar-winning documentary, My Octopus Teacher
Extraordinarily rich in detail; there is a miracle on every page. -- Scott Weidensaul, author of A World on the Wing
Higgins delivers a series of delicious lessons in what it is to be sensate, and shows how our own brains can emulate the miraculous feat of the animals with whom we share this fragile planet. -- Philip Hoare, Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author of Leviathan and Albert and the Whale
I loved Sentient, it's filled with the wonder of knowing and the infinite surprises of nature. -- Stephen Rutt, author of The Seafarers and Wintering
Educational, ground-breaking and meticulously well-researched. * Reaction Life Book Digest *
Brimming with fascinating, frequently delightful and occasionally freaky trivia this is an entertaining, gentle and easily digestible read with some important and intriguing ideas at its core. * Louder Than War *

Jackie Higgins grew up by the sea in Cornwall and has always been fascinated by the natural world. She is a television documentary director and writer, who read zoology at Oxford University, as a student of Richard Dawkins. She made wildlife films for a decade, for BBC as well as for Channel 4, National Geographic and The Discovery Channel. She then joined the BBC's science department, researching and writing, directing and producing programmes such as Tomorrow’s World and Horizon. She lives in London with her family and she is the author of Sentient.