by Helen Phillips
Marysue Rucci Books
6/2/2025, paperback
SKU: 9781668008843
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.
Reviews:
"Phillips' new novel again shows her talent for finding warmth, humanity, and connection within an all-too-conceivable dystopian landscape... Writing with precision, insight, sensitivity, and compassion, Phillips renders the way love and family bonds--between partners, parents and children, and siblings--can act as a balm and an anchor amid the buffeting winds of a fast-changing, out-of-control world. A perceptive page-turner." -- Kirkus (starred)
"This chilling vision of a near future, one where its dwellers 'can't avoid the void, ' resonates unnervingly with the way things already are. Readers won't be able to look away." -- Publisher's Weekly
"With propulsive intensity and extraordinary finesse and insight, Phillips keenly dramatizes the love and terror of parenthood in a poisoned, high-tech, yet not utterly hopeless world." -- Booklist
"Hum is a prescient, unnerving and excellent novel of a future that seems frighteningly possible. It's the story, in part, of a mother just trying to make her family happy and how the world punishes her for it. Helen Phillips writes with sharp insight and sly humor, making her critique of our current moment feel timely and timeless." -- Victor LaValle, author of Lone Women
About the Author:
Helen Phillips is the author of six books, including, most recently, the novel Hum. Her novel The Need was a National Book Award nominee and a New York Times Notable Book. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. Her collection Some Possible Solutions received the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat was a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A professor at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with artist/cartoonist Adam Douglas Thompson and their children.