Anthill
Anthill is the only novel by Edward O. Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize winning biologist who spent his career studying ants and biodiversity. It follows Raphael Semmes Cody, a boy growing up in the Alabama countryside who falls in love with a piece of longleaf pine wilderness called Nokobee. He studies its ant colonies as a child, then goes off to Harvard and law school, returning home determined to protect the place from development. At the center of the book is a remarkable embedded section that narrates the life and death of an ant colony from the ants' point of view. Published in 2010, the novel blends a southern boyhood story with a scientist's reverence for the natural systems most of us walk past without seeing.
What you might want to know about Anthill
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A coming of age novel by the great biologist Edward O. Wilson, in which an Alabama boy fights to save a wild tract he has loved since childhood.
Yes. A long central section follows an ant colony as its own community, written by one of the world's foremost ant biologists.
No. The novel is written for general readers and centers a coming of age story.
Anthill was written by Edward O. Wilson.
Anthill is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.