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.”
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Helen Phillips is the author of six books, including, most recently, the novel Hum (Simon & Schuster/Marysue Rucci Books, 2024). Her novel The Need (Simon & Schuster, 2019; Chatto & Windus, 2019) was long-listed for the National Book Award and named a New York Times Notable Book of 2019.
Helen's short story collection Some Possible Solutions (Henry Holt, 2016) received the 2017 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat (Henry Holt, 2015), a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, was a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her collection And Yet They Were Happy (Leapfrog Press, 2011) was named a notable collection by The Story Prize and was re-released in 2023. She is also the author of the children’s eco-adventure book Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green (Delacorte Press, 2012).
Helen has received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, the Iowa Review Nonfiction Award, and the DIAGRAM Innovative Fiction Award.
Her work has been featured on Selected Shorts and in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and the New York Times, among others. Her books have been or will soon be translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, and Spanish.
A graduate of Yale and the Brooklyn College MFA program, she is a professor at Brooklyn College. Born and raised in Colorado, she lives in Brooklyn with artist/cartoonist Adam Douglas Thompson, their children, and their dog.
