Meet Me in Atlantis

Mark Adams follows the same formula that worked in Turn Right at Machu Picchu — an enthusiastic amateur investigates a historical mystery, dragging readers through the scholarship and the scenery simultaneously — and applies it to the longest-running unsolved case in Western civilisation: the lost city of Atlantis.

Plato described Atlantis in two dialogues written around 360 BC — a city-state of enormous wealth and military power that was destroyed by the gods and sunk beneath the ocean in a single day and night. Since then, thousands of theories have located it in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, Antarctica, and at various points underwater off the coasts of a dozen different countries. Adams interviews the serious scholars and the enthusiasts, visits the proposed sites, and attempts to separate the plausible from the impossible.

The result is both funnier and more intellectually serious than the subject might suggest. The scholars who study the Atlantis problem are not all cranks; there are genuine debates about what Plato was drawing on, what ancient knowledge he might have encoded, and what the myth tells us about Greek thought. Adams handles all of this with the same combination of rigour and self-deprecation that made Machu Picchu such enjoyable reading.

Reading Guides

• Mark Adams Books in Order
• Where to Start with Mark Adams

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Meet Me in Atlantis apart: Consistently witty and readable; The scholarly debates are genuinely interesting; and Adams’s self-deprecating voice is engaging. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Core Ideas

The central arguments the book develops are worth summarising. The persistence of the Atlantis myth and why it matters. The boundary between legitimate archaeology and pseudoscience. The Mediterranean world that Plato was drawing on. These ideas are grounded in evidence and example rather than speculation, which distinguishes this book from comparable titles that rely on anecdote alone.

The Reading Experience

Meet Me in Atlantis is the kind of book that changes slightly depending on when you read it. The surface — plot, character, setting — remains constant, but the reader brings different things to it at different points in life, and the book meets them there. This is a property of enduring work, and it distinguishes Meet Me in Atlantis from titles that are consumed once and not returned to.

Limitations

Less emotionally engaging than Machu Picchu. The conclusion is necessarily inconclusive. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers of Turn Right at Machu Picchu and adventure non-fiction

On the Trail of a Myth

What makes Meet Me in Atlantis more than an armchair survey is that Mark Adams does what he did in Turn Right at Machu Picchu: he goes. The book is structured as a travelogue, following Adams across the Mediterranean and beyond to the places various researchers have proposed as the “real” Atlantis — from the volcanic Greek island of Santorini (ancient Thera) to the marshlands of Doñana in southern Spain, to Malta, Morocco, and the waters off Gibraltar. Along the way he interviews the amateur “Atlantologists,” academic skeptics, geologists, and classicists who have devoted careers to the question, and his gift is for taking each of them seriously enough to explain their reasoning while never losing his own measured doubt. The result reads like an intellectual detective story crossed with a travel memoir, grounded in real landscapes and real, often eccentric, human obsession.

What Plato Actually Wrote

The book’s spine is a close reading of the source itself: the only ancient accounts of Atlantis appear in two of Plato’s dialogues, the Timaeus and the Critias, written in the fourth century BCE. Adams returns repeatedly to the question of what Plato was actually doing — whether he intended a literal history, a moral allegory about a great civilization undone by hubris, or some blend drawing on half-remembered catastrophes like the Bronze Age eruption of Thera that devastated Minoan Crete. This focus is the book’s real subject and its strongest material: not whether a lost continent literally sank, but why a philosophical parable has exerted such a powerful, durable hold on the human imagination for more than two thousand years. Adams never pretends to a definitive answer — the honest conclusion is that there isn’t one — but the journey through the evidence, the theories, and the people who chase them is genuinely illuminating about myth, archaeology, and the persistent human hunger for a vanished golden age.

Who Should Read It

Meet Me in Atlantis is best suited to readers who enjoy smart, narrative non-fiction in the vein of Mary Roach, Bill Bryson, or Adams’s own Turn Right at Machu Picchu — books that take a curious question seriously while keeping the tone light and the author’s own bemusement front and center. It is not a book for readers seeking a definitive answer or a dramatic discovery; Adams is honest that the Atlantis question has no tidy solution, and the pleasure lies in the chase rather than the catch. But for anyone fascinated by myth, archaeology, the boundary between scholarship and pseudoscience, or simply the lengths to which human beings will go to find a lost paradise, it is an engaging, intelligent, and frequently funny travel companion — a reminder that the questions we cannot answer are often the most revealing ones to ask.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 3.8/5 — Adams brings the same wit and rigour as Turn Right at Machu Picchu to the Atlantis myth — taking the scholarly arguments seriously while keeping a healthy scepticism. Unexpectedly compelling.