How High We Go in the Dark

A Novel

Hardcover, 304 pages

English language

Published Jan. 18, 2022 by William Morrow.

ISBN:
978-0-06-307264-0
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OCLC Number:
1247056935

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5 stars (4 reviews)

Beginning 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 …

8 editions

Worth every minute

5 stars

How High We Go In the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu. It will make you weep; it will give you hope and destroy you at the same time. 5 stars.

I meant to read at least ten other books before this one, but when I sat down to check out the first few pages, I just kept reading straight through to the end. The world building style reminded me of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas in that it brought seemingly unrelated stories together woven through with finely connected threads. Each segment has an expertly introduced setting and characters of its own, and the writer brings us into harmony with them all, as well as with the work as a whole.

The ending may not appeal to everyone, and did not quite fully appeal to me, but it works in the context of the book, and I enjoyed the skill with which Nagamatsu …

Von Trauer, Tod (CN!) und der Zukunft der Menschheit

No rating

"How High We Go In the Dark" erzählt die Zukunft der Menschheit mit einer ganz besonderen Prämisse: Ein urzeitliches Virus taut aus dem Permafrost Sibiriens auf und zieht um die Welt - nicht so schnell wie in den letzten Jahren Corona, aber genauso gründlich und viel tödlicher. Anstatt nun aber einen wilden Technothriller zu inszenieren, entscheidet sich Autor Sequoia Nagamtasu dafür, den Umgang der Menschen mit dem allgegenwärtigen Tod und der Trauer in den Blick zu nehmen: Er zeichnet Jahrzehnte, in denen die globale Gesellschaft den Umgang mit dem Tod in den Mittelpunkt rückt. Aus Platzmangel werden neuartige Formen der Beerdigung nötig, die den Angehörigen aber - anders als z. B. Massengräber - ein angemessenes Trauern oder Abschied-Nehmen ermöglichen. Hierzu entwickeln sich neue Wirtschaftszweige und neue Technologien. Gleichzeitig bleibt immer die Hoffnung auf einen Ausweg, eine Impfung oder eine Heilung...

Das Buch ist nicht als zusammenhängende Geschichte erzählt, sondern als …

A hard but beautiful read

5 stars

If I had known ahead of time what the structure and focus of this book was, I probably wouldn't have read it. That would have been my loss.

"How High We Go In the Dark" is a series of interconnected short stories set in the same world. This is not my favorite structural style: I prefer to follow a set of characters from beginning to end. Nagamatsu, though, has a rare talent for sketching out characters you can quickly attach to. I felt sorrowful every time I reached the end of a chapter and had to say goodbye.

In this way, the structure was a good fit for the world itself, and the story the author wanted to tell: one focused on death, loss, and how it transforms us. With some frequency, leaving a character at the end of their chapter meant watching them die.

This is one the most …

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4 stars

Subjects

  • Fiction
  • Dystopian