How High We Go in the Dark | Sequoia Nagamatsu

 

“Even in the face of endings, we invent new forms of love.”

This dazzling, deeply affecting novel transcends genre to explore grief, resilience, and the boundless scope of human imagination in the face of catastrophe. Set in a future shaped by the accidental thawing of an ancient Arctic virus, the book traces a constellation of interconnected lives across time and space, forming a narrative of sorrow and hope that is both intimate and epic.

Nagamatsu’s structure—linked stories rather than a single linear narrative—mirrors the unpredictability and fragmentation of the global crisis, yet each chapter is a self-contained world: from a theme park designed to ease terminally ill children into death, to a pig genetically engineered to host the consciousness of a grieving father’s daughter, Nagamatsu envisions futures that are strange, tender, and eerily plausible.

At its heart, the novel is an inquiry into what remains when so much is lost. Nagamatsu does not offer solutions, but glimpses of connection—between people, across time, through death, and beyond. The novel is suffused with grief, but it also pulses with a quiet, radical hope: that even on a dying planet, love and wonder are not extinct.