Hum by Helen Phillips
A>New York Times Editors' Choice Named Most Anticipated by Goodreads, LitHub, and>Book Riot, this tense dystopian thriller (Time) captures an urgent and unflinching portrayal of a woman's fight for her family's security in a world shaped by global warming and rapid technological progress. In a city addled by climate change and populated by intelligent robots called hums, May loses her job to artificial intelligence. In a desperate bid to resolve her family's debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance. Seeking some reprieve from her recent hardships and from her family's addiction to their devices, she splurges on passes that allow them three nights' respite inside the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals flourish. But her insistence that her son, daughter, and husband leave their devices at home proves far more fraught than she anticipated, and the lush beauty of the Botanical Garden is not the balm she hoped it would be. When her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives as she works to restore the life of her family. Written in taut, urgent prose, Hum is a work of speculative fiction that unflinchingly explores marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities. As>New York Times bestselling author Jeff VanderMeer says, Helen Phillips, in typical bravura fashion, has found a way to make visible uncomfortable truths about our present by interrogating the near-future.
Phillips, Helen: - Helen Phillips is the author of, most recently, the novel The Need. Her collection Some Possible Solutions received the 2017 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat, a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the NYPL Young Lions Award. Her collection And Yet They Were Happy was named a notable collection by The Story Prize. She is also the author of the middle-grade novel Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green. Helen has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award and the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, and her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Tin House, and on Selected Shorts. She is an associate professor at Brooklyn College and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, artist Adam Douglas Thompson, and their children. Visit HelenCPhillips.com.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781668008836 |
| Title | Hum |
| Author | Helen Phillips |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | S&s/ Marysue Rucci Books |
| Year published | 2024-08-06 |
| Number of pages | 272 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |