Hum Hum

Hum

A Novel

    • Pre-Order
    • Expected Aug 6, 2024
    • $14.99
    • Pre-Order
    • $14.99

Publisher Description

From the National Book Award–longlisted author of The Need comes an extraordinary novel about a wife and mother who—after losing her job to AI—undergoes a procedure that renders her undetectable to surveillance…but at what cost?

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.”

GENRE
Fiction & Literature
AVAILABLE
2024
August 6
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
272
Pages
PUBLISHER
S&S/ Marysue Rucci Books
SELLER
Simon & Schuster Digital Sales LLC

More Books by Helen Phillips

The Need The Need
2019
The Beautiful Bureaucrat The Beautiful Bureaucrat
2015
Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green
2012
And Yet They Were Happy And Yet They Were Happy
2011
Branded For Life Branded For Life
2023
Simple Sewn Gifts Simple Sewn Gifts
2010