A hefty coffee-table book at an equally stonking cover price, Lost World celebrates the biodiverse western Indian Ocean hotspots of the Seychelles, and the world's largest raised coral atoll that is Aldabra, more than 700 miles away.
The first third of the book, devoted to Aldabra, is the most interesting for divers. It's not a particularly hospitable ring of islands, but it is one of the world's last surviving marine-life sanctuaries, characterised under water by hordes of sharks (11 varieties, blacktips the most populous), vicious bohar snapper, giant grouper and kingfish, spinner dolphins, green turtles and the occasional dugong, all cohabiting amid the trinity of coral, mangrove and seagrass habitats.
The Seychelles is a real marine nation - only 0.03% of its area is dry - and the world's oldest oceanic islands, carved from granite 650 million years ago. The Seychelles chapter doesn't entirely reflect this - it features some images of whale sharks, kingfish and so on, but far more space is devoted to land-crabs and birds, and sea birds and conservation have their own sections, so don't expect an exclusively underwater book.
And because Lost World is produced for the Save Our Seas Foundation, the final section is rightly dedicated to the pressing problems of conservation in this threatened area.
There are some fantastic images in here, but the writing is obsessively factual, and rather dull as a result. Peschak was of course working to an SOS brief, but I couldn't help thinking that, for divers at least, a more personal book about the underwater wonders of Aldabra would be more appealing.
Steve Weinman
Save Our Seas Foundation
ISBN: 9780620441612
Hardback, 176pp, £50
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