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How High We Go in the Dark

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How High We Go in the Dark

By: Sequoia Nagamatsu
Narrated by: Brian Nishii, Brianna Ishibashi, Greg Watanabe, Jason Culp, Jeanne Sakata, Joe Knezevich, Julia Whelan, Keisuke Hoashi, Kotaro Watanabe, Kurt Kanazawa, MacLeod Andrews, Matthew Bridges, Micky Shiloah, Stephanie Komure
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Bloomsbury presents How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu, read by Jason Culp, Stephanie Komure, Micky Shiloah, Joe Knezevich, Brianna Ishibashi, Kotaro Watanabe, Matthew Bridges, Kurt Kanazawa, Greg Watanabe, Jeanne Sakata, MacLeod Andrews, Keisuke Hoashi, Brian Nishii and Julia Whelan.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WATERSTONES DEBUT FICTION PRIZE 2022
FINALIST FOR THE BARNES & NOBLE DISCOVER PRIZE 2022
FINALIST FOR THE URSULA LE GUIN PRIZE FOR FICTION 2022
WATERSTONES AND ESQUIRE BEST BOOKS OF 2022

For fans of Cloud Atlas and Station Eleven, Sequoia Nagamatsu's debut is a wildly imaginative, genre-bending work spanning generations across the globe as humanity struggles to rebuild itself in the aftermath of a climate plague.

‘Haunting and luminous … An astonishing debut’ – Alan Moore, creator of Watchmen and V for Vendetta

'A powerfully moving and thought provoking read. At times sublime, strange and deeply human' Adrian Tchaikovsky, bestselling author of the Children of Time series

Dr. Cliff Miyashiro arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue his recently deceased daughter’s research, only to discover a virus, newly unearthed from melting permafrost. The plague unleashed reshapes life on earth for generations. Yet even while struggling to counter this destructive force, humanity stubbornly persists in myriad moving and ever inventive ways.

Among those adjusting to this new normal are an aspiring comedian, employed by a theme park designed for terminally ill children, who falls in love with a mother trying desperately to keep her son alive; a scientist who, having failed to save his own son from the plague, gets a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects—a pig—develops human speech; a man who, after recovering from his own coma, plans a block party for his neighbours who have also woken up to find that they alone have survived their families; and a widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter who must set off on cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.

From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead, How High We Go in the Dark follows a cast of intricately linked characters spanning hundreds of years as humanity endeavours to restore the delicate balance of the world. This is a story of unshakable hope that crosses literary lines to give us a world rebuilding itself through an endless capacity for love, resilience and reinvention.

Wonderful and disquieting, dreamlike and all too possible. [How High We Go in the Dark] reaches far beyond our stars while its heart remains rooted to Earth, and reminds us that our wellbeing depends on the wellbeing of our world – Samantha Shannon, author of The Priory of the Orange Tree©2022 Sequoia Nagamatsu Dystopian Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction Funny
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Critic reviews

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
Imaginative and fascinating … On a sentence level, the writing in this book is simply beautiful ... An immersive, hypnotic read
A powerfully moving and thought provoking read. At times sublime, strange and deeply human
As ambitious as it is intimate, How High We Go in the Dark is both a prescient warning and a promise of human resilience in the face of any odds. Sequoia Nagamatsu masterfully connects each slice of life into one epic and unforgettable tale, spanning centuries and generations. His debut envisions a future that is at once wonderful and disquieting, dreamlike and all too possible. It reaches far beyond our stars while its heart remains rooted to Earth, and reminds us that our wellbeing depends on the wellbeing of our world. (Samantha Shannon)
Like a Polaroid photograph, How High We Go in the Dark takes time to show its true colours. When they finally appear, the effect is all the more dazzling ... His novel, with its emphasis on family, mutual acceptance and the often unorthodox ways in which we are all connected, will be admired as much by fans of Becky Chambers’s hugely popular Wayfarers series as by readers of Richard Powers’s Booker-shortlisted Bewilderment. It is a truly genre-transcending work in which sense of wonder and literary acumen are given boundless opportunity to shine
Moving and thought-provoking… A welcome addition to a growing trend of what we might call the ‘speculative epic’: genre-bending novels that use a wide aperture to tackle large issues like climate change while jumping between characters, timelines and even narrative modes… Nagamatsu squarely hits both the ‘literary’ and ‘science fiction’ targets, 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, despite our sadness
A refractive glass exploring themes of loss, mourning and recovery through an impressive variety of characters, moods and situations …The elegiac opening story is about a man mourning his grown-up daughter as he studies a 30,000-year-old corpse … Nagamatsu’s footwork is impressive as he skips from trope to trope, and epoch to futuristic epoch
A novel that is both grimly timely while also moving past our usual notions of time to reveal a wider view— Sequoia Nagamatsu allows his story to unspool with such a great sense of scope, freedom, and clarity, creating a stunning mosaic of experience and humanness
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A really clever concept developed and told. Acting is fantastic, and really adds to the character development. Loved it.

Great story, great concept and performance

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After the last two years, to write a book like this about such personal and collective loss is a beautiful and brave thing. It is a reminder that grief is a communal thing in the midst of a pandemic. This book is brilliantly done - and expansive work that was also personal and easy to engage with.

A reminder of the long impact of grief

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I liked this book way more than I thought I would based on description and genre. It is presented to us as a novel but really it's a collection of short stories. And nobody really likes short stories anymore (me included). But this book is well and cleverly executed, and I so much enjoyed finding the correlations between all the different stories and characters it even gave me goosebumps at times... The story was heartbreaking but also hopeful like life itself I suppose.

Collection of short stories you might actually enjoy

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I greatly enjoyed the book, made all the more ‘real’ by the narrators.
A journey through time and space, and through us as people.

A thought provoking read

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Some of this was very enjoyable. I enjoyed some chapters much more than others. Each chapter is almost a standalone story, and as you progress through the story you find links between characters and the history described. The last chapter is excellent and very thought provoking.
Hats off to the authors imagination, at times I felt he was trying to pack too much into this book and it was slightly all over the place.
At times I considered giving up, but I have a rule never to do this so I persevered.
On balance it was pretty good.

Ambitious story, very imaginative

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