Hum
A Novel
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2.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A Most Anticipated Book for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Goodreads, LitHub, and Book Riot
A Best Book of the Summer for Esquire, Electric Lit, and Town & Country
A People Book of the Week
From “one of our most profound writers of speculative fiction” (The New York Times), this “tense dystopian thriller” (Time) and “tender portrait of love and care in an uncertain world” (Esquire) is 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 near-future world addled by climate change and inhabited by intelligent robots called “hums,” May loses her job to artificial intelligence. Desperate 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 reprieve from her recent hardships and her family’s addiction to their devices, May splurges on passes for her family to spend three nights respite in the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals still thrive. But when her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives to save her family.
Written with “precision, insight, sensitivity, and compassion” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), Hum is a “striking new work of dystopian fiction” (Vogue) that delves into the complexities of marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A woman struggles to protect her family in this odd and transcendent work of speculative fiction. In the near future, cities are hot, crowded, and saturated by an AI workforce known as hums. After a hum dispenses your prescription or books your flight, it’ll try to sell you a product—one targeted for you based on heaps and heaps of surveillance data. So when the unemployed May agrees to become a well-paid test subject for a surgery that will make her face subtly undetectable to surveillance, it has consequences she never could have predicted. Right from page 1, May’s anxieties as a mom and partner are palpable. Beyond the burden of May’s financial worries, author Helen Phillips claustrophobically fills her heroine’s world with screens, unrelenting consumerism, and the unspoken fear that the planet her children will inherit is dying. Hum is a stunning look at what it feels like to be a parent in the modern world.
