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A Novel
by Joe Mungo Reed
A family saga following four generations on a time-bending journey from coastal Scotland to a colony on Mars.
Hannah is a fusion scientist working in a cottage off the coast of Scotland when she's approached by a visitor from the future, a young man from a human settlement on Mars, traveling backward through time to intervene in the fate of a warming planet.
Roban lives in the Colony, a sterile outpost of civilization, where he longs for the wonders of a home planet he never knew. Between Hannah and Roban, two generations, a father and a daughter, face down an uncertain future. Andrew believes there is still time for the human spirit to triumph. For his rationalist daughter Kenzie, such idealism is not enough to keep the rising floods at bay, so she signs on to work for a company that would abandon Earth for the promise of a world beyond.
In exploring the question "What if you could come back to the past and somehow change it with technology?" Joe Mungo Reed has written an immersive story of hope, hubris, and sacrifice in the face of a frighteningly precarious present.
"A satisfying work of climate fiction involving interplanetary time travel...and the conclusion packs an emotional wallop. Fans of slipstream fiction like Cloud Atlas will find a great deal to enjoy here." ―Publishers Weekly
"[Terrestrial History] succeeds in brilliantly dramatizing some of the great questions of our time. Can we technologize our way out of the climate crisis or should we instead focus our energies on collaboratively solving the problem with the tools we have? Is Earth our only viable planetary home or can we adequately replicate its richness elsewhere? If the latter, who will get to go? And what fate awaits those left behind? And is the future worth living for those who manage to leave?" ―Kirkus Reviews
"Science Fiction, lyrical lament, generational fissures, apocalyptic reality… this is a novel that strikes all the notes. Terrestrial History is smart, engrossing, devastating, and brought to an impeccable finish." ―Joy Williams, author of Harrow and The Visiting Privilege
"Terrestrial History is many things: an intimate family story, an ambitious novel of ideas, a poignant parable of human striving, and an intricately imagined climate fiction. Joe Mungo Reed writes beautiful, precise prose; every sentence is glorious. I have never read such a tender elegy for our planet." ―Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward
This information about Terrestrial History was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Joe Mungo Reed is the author of the novels Hammer and We Begin Our Ascent. He teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge and lives in London.
Happy Land
by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
From the New York Times bestselling author, a novel about a family's secret ties to a vanished American Kingdom.
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading, you wish the author that wrote it was a ...
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