Galileo's Daughter meets The Cloudspotter's Guide Author is a regular contributor to Radio 4 and New Scientist Gabrielle's next book, The Hot Topic, tackles climate change and will raise her profile further

We not only live in the air, we live because of it. At ground level air transforms miraculously; it wraps our planet in a blanket of warmth, while the outer layer of our atmosphere soaks up violent flares from the sun. In this fascinating celebration of the Earth's fragile atmosphere, Gabrielle Walker traces a journey of groundbreaking scientific discovery from the first experiments in the Renaissance to recent findings in space.