Matt Haig, The Humans
My book club friend made an excellent choice, I'd say, in dropping Stuart Turton's SF-y Last Murder at the End of the World for Matt Haig's The Humans. Both are by English writers, so in that sense it's not unreasonable to lump them together genre-wise, but they're radically different from each other, and I'm a whole lot closer to loving The Humans than I ever expected.
"This is the book I am most proud of. I have never written anything like it and probably never will again. I have no idea if you will like it. I really hope you do. I am a nervous wreck about this one. I don’t really know why. Well, I do. Because it is personal. I put absolutely everything I had into it so if people don’t like it then they don’t like me, because all the best things I have to offer the world are inside its pages. I don’t want to tell you it is a book that features an alien in it, because you might not like books with aliens in it, and I don’t really."
Honestly it's a gem, and utterly so, even when I wasn't entirely on board.
In essence, and without giving away anything that's not on the cover, this is a novel about an alien, newly arrived on Earth, whose mission is to kill everyone who might know that Professor Andrew Martin, a mathematician at Cambridge, has proven the Riemann Hypothesis. (The aliens know that once humans prove this hypothesis, they'll be able to harness prime numbers and become truly space-faring, but we're not to be trusted and therefore need to be suppressed.)
Because Andrew is kind of a terrible person, "everyone" turns out to be a very short list, beginning with Andrew himself. The alien takes on Andrew's identity immediately after killing him (which happens off-page), because this will make it easier to decide who else needs to be killed, beginning with his wife and teenaged son. Not unpredictably, the alien Andrew comes to see humans as vastly more complicated than he'd expected, and not nearly so murderous or unredeemable, so he has to make some very difficult choices.
Did I expect to find in this SF novel a numbered list of reasons to appreciate being human, of which I approved of SUCH a high percentage? Absolutely not, though it was less surprising to recognize in the alien's discombobulated occupancy of a human body something like my own, but that's all of us (isn't it? It's not only me, is it?). To some extent, it reads like a post-breakdown novel, something like a metaphor for returning to one's own life after a breakdown, and I mean that as a compliment because it reads so genuinely for all its putative SF-ness.
It's more than ten years old, this novel, and Haig's written a number of things since then that I really should be getting to, but I feel like this one might stick with me for a while.
If you've got time for a quick read, especially if your demographics suit and if the above description feels right, you should make time for The Humans. You won't regret it.
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