From the National Book Awardâlonglisted author of The Need comes an extraordinary novel about a wife and mother whoâafter losing her job to AIâundergoes a procedure that renders her undetectable to surveillanceâŚbut at what cost?
In a city addled by climate change and populated by intelligent robots called âhums,â May loses her job to artificial intelligence. In a desperate bid to resolve her familyâs 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 familyâs addiction to their devices, she splurges on passes that allow them three nightsâ 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, âHelen Phillips, in typical bravura fashion, has found a way to make visible uncomfortable truths about our present by interrogating the near-future.â