Under Story by Chloe Benjamin - Sci Fi Book Review

I am truly obsessed with this book – an instant 6 star read, possibly my favourite of the entire year so far.

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Laurel has taken a job on a research station in the Antarctic, as a dishwasher, despite being an academic biologist; she’s escaping something that, at the beginning of the book, we’re not yet privy to. During her time there, a strange light that they call the Arc appears in the sky, which is when her former husband, a physicist, unexpectedly arrives to find out more about it. Together, they realise this might be the chance they needed to test out a crazy theory and relive the part of their lives that went wrong.

I have a true book hangover for this one – it’s spilling over into my everyday life. I genuinely looked at my child and worried about how young he was before remembering that I’m not in the antiverse! But to feel that invested in a storyline, it must have been written exceptionally well – I was in deep.

I’m not sure how to explain it, but this book gave Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow vibes. I think because it was an epic story that encompassed entire lifetimes. If you asked me to explain the book, I would struggle to do so without talking about it for hours. There’s just so much going on. You couldn’t really describe it as a single genre – love, but not a romance; speculative fiction, but not a heavy sci-fi.

I’ve seen this book being described as a love letter to the earth, and I absolutely get that. It makes you consider the world through different eyes, both in terms of multiverses, but also on a smaller scale level, how the way we live and the way that biology and physics work affects so much more than we realise. It was an ongoing journey of exploration but also isolation.

While it’s a highly speculative book that covers topics that feel somewhat brain-melting, it still keeps it simple enough to understand fairly easily. I liked that the scientific topics were given enough detail that they felt well-explained, and as someone who has zero scientific background, I didn’t feel totally lost.

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I put this book down and instantly turned to my husband to predict that this will be a popular one. I will be thinking about this book for a very long time. This is a book of grief and love and time and science. It was a unique reading experience. I wish I could read it for the first time all over again, and I didn’t want it to end.

Thank you to Netgalley, the author and the publishers for an ARC of this book.