Togetherness: Symbiosis and the Hidden Story of Life’s Greatest Collaborations

by Rowan Hooper

From evolution to capitalism, ‘survival of the fittest’ has shaped our view of the world. But we got it wrong – and our mistake has brought us to the brink.

For the history of life on Earth is much more than a story of competition. The natural world has been forged and sustained by small miracles of co-operation between animals and plants, insects and fungi, fish and bacteria – these partnerships are ubiquitous, lifelong and are an essential guide for a better future.

In Togetherness, Rowan Hooper reveals the intimate connectedness of nature through these remarkable stories of symbiosis. From the female wasp venturing deep inside a fig and the intricate relationship between corals and the algae that sustain them to the symbiotic gut microbes that influence our moods, he explores how co-operation is fundamental to life itself and to protecting our shared future.

Togetherness will change the way you see the world, our place in it – and our obligation to its hidden wonders.

Genres: Nonfiction, Nature, Science

416 pages, Hardcover

First published June 4, 2026

About the author

Rowan Hooper is Managing Editor of New Scientist magazine, where he has spent more than ten years writing about all aspects of science.

He has a PhD in evolutionary biology, and worked as a biologist in Japan for five years, before joining the Japan Times newspaper in Tokyo, and later taking up a fellowship at Trinity College Dublin.

Two collections of his long-running column for the paper have been published in Japan, and his work has also appeared in The Economist, Guardian, Wired and the Washington Post.

He lives in London with his partner and two daughters.

Reviews

[Peter Tillman]

Rave review at The Guardian is well-worth reading:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
Excerpt:
"My review copy of Togetherness is now peppered with marginal annotations of “Wow!”"

Published 4 June 2026.

[Sam]

Symbiosis, Hooper writes in his introduction, “...is everywhere; it was at the origin of life and at the colonisation of land by the first plants. Symbiosis is what has shaped the composition of our atmosphere, and it has driven the creation of Earth itself.”

I found this thesis thrilling – the idea that we could track symbiosis’ role chronologically through time to map its role in shaping the biosphere – and really wanted to read a book which straightforwardly told the story: here is symbiosis’ role in merging mitochondria into the first eukaryote; here is the way the symbiotes of lichen may have emerged from the seas and turned the slimeball earth into proto-soil; etc., etc.

Instead of being that more directed and argumentative book, though, Togetherness is more like a huge, maximally digressive tour of Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Symbiosis (But Didn’t Know You Should Ask).

There are 22 chapters, each one like a very rich magazine article; Hooper writes beautiful prose, and while the overall thesis is substantiated, it’s not done in anything vaguely resembling a linear path.

Instead, what we do get, in Togetherness, is an episodic adventure. We get the incredible-and-horrible truth about figs and fig wasps, two entities so deeply enmeshed that, at the end, they seem more like a single entity which happens to have both flowers and wings. We get orchids, the scientific confusion about how they germinate (spoiler alert, it’s symbiotic), and how Darwin and his grandfather felt about these odd flowers. We get fungi, Darwin’s bachelor flat, bleaching corals, Lynn Margulis arguing for endosymbiosis, the conceptualization of the biosphere and Lovelock’s love life. We get everything from Emily Dickinson’s pressed flowers to the possible role of parasites in “tuning” human immune systems to the microbes that live near mega-hot hydrothermal vents. We get so, so much – a cornucopia of ideas, images, facts and speculations about symbiosis, ecology, and jita funi (the Zen idea of blurred boundary between self and other). All offered in semi-autonomous chapters, each one of which could blow your mind.

So to you, the symbiosis-curious, or even the symbiosis-knowledgeable, I do highly recommend this book – just with the caveat that it’s less like a detective story and more like an anthology; less like a line and more like a fractal. I do think this book would make an amazing backbone for a class or a book club or discussion group that wanted to do, like, a chapter a week; I do think that the ideas it expounds are freaking crucial to grapple with if we want to continue successful life in this biosphere. So buy it, read it, and let’s get together at the pub next Thursday to discuss it; just don’t pass me the fig and cheese plate.


(Thanks to Netgalley and Penguin Random House for the ARC)

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting.