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How High We Go in the Dark
Cover of How High We Go in the Dark
How High We Go in the Dark
A Novel
Borrow Borrow

NATIONAL BESTSELLER NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE ROXANE GAY'S AUDACIOUS BOOK CLUB PICK FINALIST FOR THE URSULA K. LE GUIN PRIZE

"Moving and thought-provoking . . . offering psychological insights in lyrical prose while seriously exploring speculative conceits." — New York Times Book Review

"Haunting and luminous . . . Beautiful and lucid science fiction. An astonishing debut." — Alan Moore, creator of Watchmen and V for Vendetta

Recommended by New York Times Book Review Los Angeles TimesNPRWashington Post • Wall Street Journal Entertainment Weekly Esquire Good Housekeeping NBC NewsBuzzfeedGoodreads The MillionsThe Philadelphia Inquirer Minneapolis Star-Tribune San Francisco ChronicleThe Guardianand many more!

For fans of Cloud Atlas and Station Eleven, a spellbinding and profoundly prescient debut that follows a cast of intricately linked characters over hundreds of years as humanity struggles to rebuild itself in the aftermath of a climate plague—a daring and deeply heartfelt work of mind-bending imagination from a singular new voice.

In 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work of his recently deceased daughter at the Batagaika Crater, where researchers are studying long-buried secrets now revealed in melting permafrost, including the perfectly preserved remains of a girl who appears to have died of an ancient virus.

Once unleashed, the Arctic plague will reshape life on Earth for generations to come, quickly traversing the globe, forcing humanity to devise a myriad of moving and inventive ways to embrace possibility in the face of tragedy. In a theme park designed for terminally ill children, a cynical employee falls in love with a mother desperate to hold on to her infected son. A heartbroken scientist searching for a cure finds a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects—a pig—develops the capacity for human speech. A widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter embark on a cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.

From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead to interstellar starships, Sequoia Nagamatsu takes readers on a wildly original and compassionate journey, spanning continents, centuries, and even celestial bodies to tell a story about the resilience of the human spirit, our infinite capacity to dream, and the connective threads that tie us all together in the universe.

"Wondrous, and not just in the feats of imagination, which are so numerous it makes me dizzy to recall them, but also in the humanity and tenderness with which Sequoia Nagamatsu helps us navigate this landscape. . . . This is a truly amazing book, one to keep close as we imagine the uncertain future." — Kevin Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of Nothing to See Here

NATIONAL BESTSELLER NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE ROXANE GAY'S AUDACIOUS BOOK CLUB PICK FINALIST FOR THE URSULA K. LE GUIN PRIZE

"Moving and thought-provoking . . . offering psychological insights in lyrical prose while seriously exploring speculative conceits." — New York Times Book Review

"Haunting and luminous . . . Beautiful and lucid science fiction. An astonishing debut." — Alan Moore, creator of Watchmen and V for Vendetta

Recommended by New York Times Book Review Los Angeles TimesNPRWashington Post • Wall Street Journal Entertainment Weekly Esquire Good Housekeeping NBC NewsBuzzfeedGoodreads The MillionsThe Philadelphia Inquirer Minneapolis Star-Tribune San Francisco ChronicleThe Guardianand many more!

For fans of Cloud Atlas and Station Eleven, a spellbinding and profoundly prescient debut that follows a cast of intricately linked characters over hundreds of years as humanity struggles to rebuild itself in the aftermath of a climate plague—a daring and deeply heartfelt work of mind-bending imagination from a singular new voice.

In 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work of his recently deceased daughter at the Batagaika Crater, where researchers are studying long-buried secrets now revealed in melting permafrost, including the perfectly preserved remains of a girl who appears to have died of an ancient virus.

Once unleashed, the Arctic plague will reshape life on Earth for generations to come, quickly traversing the globe, forcing humanity to devise a myriad of moving and inventive ways to embrace possibility in the face of tragedy. In a theme park designed for terminally ill children, a cynical employee falls in love with a mother desperate to hold on to her infected son. A heartbroken scientist searching for a cure finds a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects—a pig—develops the capacity for human speech. A widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter embark on a cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.

From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead to interstellar starships, Sequoia Nagamatsu takes readers on a wildly original and compassionate journey, spanning continents, centuries, and even celestial bodies to tell a story about the resilience of the human spirit, our infinite capacity to dream, and the connective threads that tie us all together in the universe.

"Wondrous, and not just in the feats of imagination, which are so numerous it makes me dizzy to recall them, but also in the humanity and tenderness with which Sequoia Nagamatsu helps us navigate this landscape. . . . This is a truly amazing book, one to keep close as we imagine the uncertain future." — Kevin Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of Nothing to See Here

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About the Author-
  • Sequoia Nagamatsu is a Japanese-American writer and managing editor of Psychopomp Magazine, an online quarterly dedicated to innovative prose. Originally from Hawaii and the San Francisco Bay Area, he holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Southern Illinois University and a BA in Anthropology from Grinnell College. His work has appeared in such publications as Conjunctions, The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, Fairy Tale Review, and Tin House. He is the author of the award-winning short story collection Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone and teaches creative writing at St. Olaf College and the Rainier Writing Workshop Low-Residency MFA program. He currently lives in Minnesota with his wife, cat, and a robot dog named Calvino.

Reviews-
  • Library Journal

    August 1, 2021

    A product of more than 10 years' labor, this novel will ring out sharply in today's pandemic world. In 2030, archaeologists troweling through the Arctic Circle's melting permafrost discover the well-preserved remains of a girl who evidently died of an ancient virus. The plague thus unleashed harries generations, as people find new ways to mourn. There are funerary skyscrapers and hotels for the dead, interstellar starships (the better to find a safer place), and a theme park for terminally ill children where an employee falls for a mother desperate to hold her child one last time. As with his story collection Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone, a BuzzFeed Notable Book and Entropy Best Book, Nagamatsu blends literary and visionary verve in a narrative winning comparison to Cloud Atlas and Station Eleven. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

    Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

  • Publisher's Weekly

    October 4, 2021
    Nagamatsu’s ambitious, mournful debut novel-in-stories (after the collection Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone) offers a mosaic portrait of the near future, detailing the genesis and fallout of an ancient alien plague reawakened from a Neanderthal corpse thanks to the melting permafrost in the Siberian tundra. Combining the literary and the science fictional, each subtly interconnected chapter examines a point of failure during the dying days of the great human experiment: in the social safety net, in marriages, in families, and in compassion for non-humanoid life-forms. As the flu-like pandemic intersects with increasing climate change and exposes society’s flaws, the characters bear witness to a massive extinction event happening to them in real time. Nagamatsu can clearly write, but this exploration of global trauma makes for particularly bleak reading: the novel offers no resolutions, or even much hope, just snapshots of grief and loss. (Those with weak stomachs, meanwhile, will want to skip the “Songs of Your Decay” for its graphic descriptions of corpse decomposition.) Readers willing to speculate about a global crisis not too far off from reality will find plenty to think about in this deeply sad but well-rendered vision of an apocalyptic future. Agent: Annie Hwang, Ayesha Pande Literary.

  • Kirkus

    October 15, 2021
    What happens to humanity when death radically outpaces life? Scientists digging in Siberia find the body of a girl who seems to be a mix of Homo sapien and Neanderthal while also possessing genetic traits that look like starfish or octopus. She's dressed in clothes remarkable not only for their fine needlework, but also for the fact that they're decorated with shells from the Mediterranean. Unearthing this girl releases a virus that destroys human organs. From this strange, terrifying beginning the narrative moves to the City of Laughter, an amusement park where children infected with the virus can enjoy one last, fun-filled day before riding a roller coaster designed to kill them. Nagamatsu's characters inhabit societies so overwhelmed by death that funerary services of various kinds dominate the economy and in which the past is disappearing while it's impossible to imagine a future. Many of the chapters in this novel were first published as short stories. Cobbling these stories together makes a novel-length book, but it doesn't necessarily make a satisfying novel. The different ways in which people deal with grief and survival accumulate without revealing new insights. The chapter in which a man contemplating suicide finds connection in a virtual world is an echo of the chapter about a man who repairs robotic pets who speak in the voices of the dead. A chapter in which a forensic pathologist falls in love with a man who has donated his body for research is virtually the same as the chapter in which a funerary artist who makes ice sculptures from liquified remains falls in love with a customer. And while there are characters who recur, a lot of these connections feel superimposed for the sake of crafting a novel. The final chapter--but for a brief coda--circles back to the beginning in a way that's thrilling for a moment. Then Nagamatsu lays bare the mystery of the opening chapter in a way that can only be rewarding for hardcore devotees of the ancient astronaut school of ufology or readers for whom this concept is entirely new. Ambitious, bleak, and not fully realized.

    COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  • Booklist

    December 1, 2021
    Nagamatsu examines the way a pandemic changes the world in the decades and even centuries that follow in chapters told from the perspectives of various linked characters. The story opens when Dr. Cliff Miyashiro journeys to Siberia to finish the work that claimed the life of his daughter, a passionate environmentalist. When Cliff and his colleagues accidentally release an ancient virus contained in the remains of a prehistoric girl frozen in ice, the world christens it the Arctic Plague. As the pandemic spreads across the earth, society finds ways to grieve and honor the dying and dead, including erecting an amusement park specifically for terminally ill children, creating robotic dogs that capture the voices and personalities of lost loved ones, and hotels where families can stay to celebrate the lives of those they've lost. The tragedy causes humanity to look to the stars for salvation, as Cliff's wife, Miki, sets off with their granddaughter and a contingent of pioneers hoping to establish a colony on a habitable planet. Both epic and deeply intimate, Nagamatsu's debut novel is science fiction at its finest, rendered in gorgeous, evocative prose and offering hope in the face of tragedy through human connection.

    COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  • New York Times Book Review

    "Moving and thought-provoking . . . You'll be impressed with Nagamatsu's meticulous craft. . . . Well-honed prose, poignant meditations and unique concepts . . . offering psychological insights in lyrical prose while seriously exploring speculative conceits. . . . How High We Go in the Dark is a book of sorrow for the destruction we're bringing on ourselves. Yet the novel reminds us there's still hope in human connections." — New York Times Book Review

    "Thoughtful explorations of how the survivors process death and loss . . . Even the bleakest stories conjure up a memorable image, and often that visual involves reaching upward: to the stars, to a memory, or even just stretching your arms skyward at the roller coaster's peak, whether or not you know how the ride ends. . . . ambitious . . . achingly poignant . . . an emotional roller coaster." — NPR

    "Exactly the white-hot missive of hope, humanity, and compassion you need . . . Each story is a marvel of imagination . . . Rich in scope and vision, with each nested story masterfully rippling across others, this is a visionary novel about grief, resilience, and how the human spirit endures."
    Esquire

    "Nagamatsu's novel isn't about hope, but about how things change in the space between possible and impossible. Of course the one thing that never changes, even or especially in tragic times, is human nature." — Los Angeles Times

    "Done artfully. . . . A heartbreaking tribute to humanity." — Entertainment Weekly, 5 Must Read Books

    "Lovely and haunting." — Wall Street Journal

    "Haunting and hopeful story about grief, loss and the different ways we move on . . . Deeply moving." — NBC News

    "How High We Go in the Dark is a truly genre-transcending work in which sense of wonder and literary acumen are given boundless opportunity to shine." — The Guardian (UK)

    "This hauntingly beautiful story focuses on how the human spirit perseveres through it all. With everything from a cosmic search for home to a theme park for terminally ill kids and a talking pig, it's a lyrical adventure that feels fantastical yet familiar." — Good Housekeeping, The 15 Best and Most-Anticipated Books of 2022

    "[A] searing literary dystopia. . . . Each character is intimately drawn as they grapple with a future that gives very little freedom to hope or dream. . . . It feels like an archive of personal stories about what the future may bring." — Buzzfeed News, 23 New Fantasy And Science Fiction Books We're Excited About

    "How High We Go in the Dark is ambitious and intricately plotted. A beautiful meditation on the way everything in this world—no, in the universe—is connected. . . . The writing is beautiful and immersive, and at times hypnotic. It asks both the big questions and the small questions of what will become of us, and even when the answers are complex, there remains the bright beacon of hope." — Roxane Gay

    "Haunting and luminous, How High We Go in the Dark orchestrates its multitude of memorable voices into beautiful and lucid science fiction that resembles a fitful future memory of our present. An astonishing debut." — Alan Moore, creator of Watchmen and V for Vendetta

    "How High We Go in the Dark is wondrous not just in the feats of imagination, which are so numerous that it makes me dizzy to recall them, but also in the humanity and tenderness with which Sequoia Nagamatsu helps us navigate this...

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