Earth 7
A Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jun 9, 2026
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- $13.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
An end-of-the-world love story, an epic full of pathos and humor, asking what can be saved of our planet
Well, that’s about it for the story of planet Earth, poor Earth, reduced to not much more than a piece of burnt coal. But, as Deb Olin Unferth shows in her latest electrifying novel, life and love persist, even in the most unexpected, inhospitable places.
Two women meet on a beach of artificial sand. One was raised in a pod in the ocean and the other may or may not be a robot. Their love—or any love—seems so unlikely. Earth is severely depopulated. Some people have given up, gone off to Mars. Others pursue eternal life as digital code. And yet others, like Dylan and Melanie, are holdouts—and some of those holdouts are constructing a vast molecular collection in hopes that a future person may be alive to make a new Earth. Foolhardy? Misguided? Quixotic? Probably. But what can a human (or a robot) do?
By the end of Unferth’s wild, poetic, revelatory, and slyly philosophical novel, the reader has traveled to the very edges of the cosmos as a “soul globule” and between grains of sand as a microscopic tardigrade. A slim book tackling big questions (is all matter conscious? will we tech ourselves into salvation, or out of existence?), Earth 7 is a poignant inquiry into death, mourning, and indefatigable life, the most exhilarating work to date by one of our most original and beloved writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Unferth's remarkable third novel (after Barn 8) takes place in a distant future where a severely depopulated Earth has turned mostly to sand. At the outset, protagonist Dylan is being raised by her mother, Rosemary, in an underwater pod. Rosemary is a researcher, part of a team from a lab back on Earth's surface who are working to preserve the DNA of the planet's many species in an effort to eventually recreate Earth as it once was. The original collection, known as Earth 2, and its copies, 3 through 5, have been lost to looters, and the team is now compiling Earth 6. Though Dylan finds the work of the lab "irritating and absurd, all this so-called Earth-saving," it offers her an escape from the suffocation of her mother and the depths of the ocean when she lands an internship on the surface. Tasked with sweeping sand, she makes a miraculous discovery of "micro-animals" that appear lifeless and can be used to hide DNA. Over the course of the satisfying narrative, Dylan, as an adult, carries on Rosemary's work. Unferth shines in her ability to craft relatable characters in extraordinary circumstances, and the novel remains accessible even as it explores deep ontological questions about the nature of life. This is profound.
