Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the earlier access to this book.

It was an interesting read!

Honestly going into this I didn't quite know what to expect, I mean surely 300 pages about dust can't be that interesting.

But I was so wrong this book honestly has changed the way I see things. Dust to me always was just an annoying thing to be cleaned away you never think about what it might contain and where it came from.

Honestly reading about all the atomic bomb research and those who as still affected by it even to this day causes no end of frustration. How often humanity totally disregards other who aren't the 'same' as them. This book contains important stories about people who the disserve more.

. And I for one am glad I'm no longer ignorant to what has gone on

Some books shouldn't have introductions. And whilst it makes sense for Jay Owens to show her hand a bit, since she is purportedly writing a book about the importance of dust in the world, her long, rambling and self-indulgent prologue describing the wacky thought processes that brought her to write about - of all things - that most insignificant of topics: Dust - put me right off. I might have thrown the book against the wall if I hadn't already received a glowing review and it was contained within an electronic reading device. The authorial voice here I found terribly annoying.

Luckily the contents of Dust mitigate for this on the whole. So whilst I found her annoying, her little asides on the way to visit a dustbowl town in the US, or talk about the dust caused by the LA water system in the US, or the after-effects of the nuclear tests in the US, those were all fascinating subjects. But she does go hiking with her mates a lot, and they do take her to dusty places and for a book subtitled "The Modern World in a Trillion Particles" she does visit the USA a lot. Greenland gets a look in, as does a remarkably self-obsessed Fire Festival lite trip to Khazakstan, dancing in the dust. Her heart is in the right place, and the environmental conversations here are impeccable but there are moments for example in the (somewhat out of place but obligatory) conversation about vacuum cleaners, dusting and the gendering of chores which just feel holier than thou. And yet for every turn of phrase that repulsed me (my companion at the time will testify to this), there are ten interesting facts, stories, or humanisations of this story.

Dust, it turns out, is largely not even a story about dust - which is very on brand for the author. She finally shows his hand in the final chapters and it turns out to be mainly about water. I had almost finished it by then, and actually was a bit pleased she hadn't really pulled off his original wheeze at all. There is a proper book about Dust waiting to be written, and it will probably include half of this material - though perhaps with a more diverse global set of case studies. And it'll be written by someone who won't set my teeth on edge. In the meantime I am happy to recommend this, particularly if you don't mind a hate read with your fascinating facts.

It's fascinating as dust can be the one we clean in our homes, it can be caused by an atomic explosion or the rest of the big bang.
An informative and fascinating book, a book about the universe and the very smaill.
I liked the stile of writing and the storytelling.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

A book delving into very small things as a way of thinking about the mind-breakingly huge, which might sound counterintuitive - is it really easier to grasp two incomprehensible things before breakfast than one? - but for the most part pulls it off. There is one chapter on dust in the domestic sense, a history of standards of domestic cleanliness which would be hilarious if it weren't for the countless wasted hours implicit in its account of ratcheting cleanliness standards, but for the most part the focus is wider, from the Dust Bowl to nuclear fallout to what used to be the Aral Sea. As examples, they weren't new to me, but the lens Owens brings to them, the way she yokes them together, and in most cases first-hand reportage, put them in a new light. And just as it's so easy not to notice that accumulating dust at home, so over and over again the story of dust on a macro scale is revealed as a story of denial, whether denying there's a problem (air pollution, soil exhaustion) until far too late - or simply denying the humanity of whichever luckless fuckers live in the areas that have been deemed eligible for sacrifice in the interests of particular visions of progress. Even while cataloguing what a spectacular mess we've made of the planet in so many entangled ways, Owens determinedly digs for signs of renewal, possibilities of restitution - not least in the final chapter, which circles back to LA's water wars and looks at the Herculean efforts to mitigate the damage they did to the Owens Valley (no relation). You could even infer an analogy from the fact of all those tiny particles having such enormous impacts; after all, if dust can be so small yet change so much when it works together, what might humans yet achieve? Too often, though, it seems that for all the destruction wrought by our grand efforts to order the world, declare that here shall prosper and there shall pay, only to find the dust creeping in to say otherwise, humanity responds with another grand, doomed plan. I would love to look back on this review in decades to come and be proved wrong, for the various bottom-up attempts at salvage to interlock and shore up fragments against our ruin. But mainly I just found it too perfectly apt that we're choking to death, breeding tumours, poisoning the waters, with something which was already established millennia ago as the perfect metaphor for the folly of human ambition, the inevitable annihilations of time. It may be a fucked-up world, but sometimes it's got a real knack for foreshadowing.

(Netgalley ARC)