I don't know how to talk about this book. Told in vignettes across many years, it follows different characters before, during, and after an epidemic. Despite the short amount of time you spend with these characters I was very emotionally invested. It's surreal, heartbreaking, odd, and upsetting and despite the difficult nature of the story, I couldn't put it down. I'll be thinking about the second section of the book (set at the park) for a long time - it was beautifully written and absolutely gut-wrenching. The last section of the book is why its a 4.5 and not a 5 star rating. It answered many questions but did little for me emotionally and narratively. In this case I guess I preferred the mystery.

A must read for 2022.

What a read this is!

Set in the context of a global pandemic (don’t worry, it’s not the story of Covid), this has an incredible narrative - a multitude of dystopian fables which weave a variety of characters together in space and time. Many of the fables seem distinct in their own right, but they carefully thread together as you work out relationships and ancestry.

Super clever and beautifully crafted, this is a really excellent and enjoyable read.

It took me a few pages to get into this, but once I did? I was drawn in completely. You're always hearing in the news about scientists discovering things in the permafrost and messing about with stuff that they shouldn't and this book delves into that.

In some places, it's a difficult read. Having lost my father last year, dealing with a story that delves so deeply into death and grief and how that affects people made for sometimes, uncomfortable reading, but what keeps you turning the pages are how well and how beautifully those pages are written.

This is a masterful debut and one I shall return to for a second read later on.

Loved this very much! It's imaginative and clever, but with real heart. So many of the themes relate to what's going on in our crazy world at the moment that, although it's fiction, it actually helped me process a bit of stress and grief.

Dark, imaginative, ambitious, wild, beautiful book of interlinked stories. Because it sometimes depressed me a bit too much, 4 instead of 5 stars.
Thank you Bloomsbury and Netgalley UK for the ARC.

“It’s strange how the discovery of an ancient girl in Siberia and viruses we’ve never encountered before can both redefine what we know about being human and at the same time threaten our humanity”

This is Sequoia Nagamatsu’s debut novel and I think will be a much talked about novel in 2022.

Ostensibly it is a part speculative fiction/part science fiction/part future dystopian novel, written in the form of a series of separate but interlinked stories – dealing with a global plague in the near future and its consequence over future decades but later roaming over space and time.

The book on that level has clear shades of both David Mitchell (even more so given large parts of the book are set in Japan like Mitchell’s early novels) and Emily St John Mandel (not least as this shares a UK editor, if not publisher, with Station Eleven) with shades of Margaret Atwood and even Dr Who.

But really this is a very distinctive book about death and grief – and this makes for a book which is both very difficult to read (every story has the loss of a child, parent or grandparent integral to it which can lead to an accumulation of bleakness which I think some readers may struggle with in our pandemic times) but also with a more hopeful (even at times sentimental) undercurrent.

The author’s only previous publication was a more conventional (in form but not content) short story collection “Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone”. In a fascinating interview on that book he was, interestingly asked about a recurring theme of loss and grief and was asked about a Joyce Carol Oates quote that “Grief is the most humane of emotions but it is a one-sided emotion: it is not reciprocated.” leading to him commenting at some length on grieving (perhaps showing how close it was to his mind already)

I think the one-sidedness of grief is what allows people, our characters to shape that emotion into distinct experience. The grief isn’t just a product of something that happened to the character but it becomes the character and informs how a character moves through a story.. ….. A grieving character may run away, confront the loss, imagine another life, pour themselves into work, or maybe find solace in someone who is also grieving. One-sided? Sure. If we consider one-sided as allowing those that have suffered a loss to use their grief to create dialogues with aspects of themselves and the dead. And I think whether or not those shadows reciprocate (and coming to terms with some answer) is part of process of healing (and often the end of a story) ….. But to what extent is order and foresight at play during the grieving process? I can’t blame my characters for their trajectories in the same way that I can’t blame myself for a story not arriving at the destination that I had in mind. So, I think it’s more of a collection of pathways of grief with each path being just as worthy as the other. There are no right or wrong ways to deal with a loss. The addition of magic just makes certain pathways that would otherwise go unnoticed more distinct and visible

In terms of this novel – the author explained in a Bookseller interview that the novel’s origins go back 10 years (before the short story collection) when he was living in Japan and dealing with the death of his grandfather, a death (due to living apart from his family in the US) he was unaware of until months after it happened – leaving him with guilt about not saying goodbye. He then in turn became interested in the implication of an ageing population in a city with no space for new cemeteries or temples : “There are funeral skyscrapers in Tokyo and mortuary expos which offer families the chance to share an urn, for example. All these alternative funerary practices naturally entered my writing because I have always been interested in loss and grief and how differently people react to it. I always thought that was a very dynamic way of looking into the human condition.”

So death and grief and the different pathways to grieving are a crucial part of his art and writing – and the idea of a global plague which makes fundamental changes to global mortality, changes and a sense of loss and grief exacerbated by climate change, gives him plenty of scope to explore this topic while working in other influences such as Carl Sagan, Star Trek, (probably too much) late 20th Century pop music, Japanese folklore and even a reaction to Trump and the anti-Asian backlash which followed from his “China Virus” jibes, wanting instead to show Asian-Americans “just living their lives, as well as being victims of the pandemic themselves”.

“30,000 Years Beneath a Eulogy” starts the story and gives the crucial background to the plague. It is written by an academic – Cliff Mirayisho visiting a research centre at the Batagaika crater in Siberia, shortly after the tragic death of his daughter Clara (a climate change activist and researcher who put her work ahead of her daughter Yumi – who lives with Cliff and his artist wife Miki). The crystal pendant wearing Clara had discovered the remains of a 30,000 young part Neanderthal slightly tatooed girl “Annie” in what seems to be some kind of sophisticated memorial. The body was uncovered by the rapidly thawing permafrost, the thawing acting as both a sign of and a multiplier for climate change but also causing another danger as the girl seems to have died of a hiterhto unknown virus which infects the researchers

“City of Laughter” is set a few years later and is perhaps one of the saddest of the stories. The virus has become the so-called Arctic Plague, which has high mortality among children and seems to function by reprogramming organ cells to act like other organs. The first party protagonist Skip has taken a job at a theme park adapted as a “euthanasia park” – which gives dying children a last few quality days of life before they are euthanised on the park’s main ride (Osiris). The park is extended to accept a group of children undergoing a drug trial and Skip though forms an attachment to one of the children Fitch and his mother Dorrie (an ex-artist now working in the checkout facilities – giving parent’s their children’s ashes – and who is separated from her Firth’s father who is trying to develop new organs for Fitch).

“Through the Garden of Memory” is perhaps the hardest to parse of the stories. The narrator Jun is in a coma in hospital with the virus when he suddenly finds himself in what seems to be some form of shared dream or afterlife or alternative lifes (the idea of second chances is a key motif in the novel) – in some form of dark pit which is then filled with orbs of light containing glimpses both of other lives and the past lives of those in the pit (all of whom were dying plague victims). This story also gives the novel its title as Jun finding a baby persuades his fellows to form a human pyramid which he can climb to try and get the baby up to the seeming source of the lights.

“Pig Son” was for me the weakest of the short stories – mixing Ishiguro with Babe (or for me with M&S Percy Pig). It is narrated by Fitch’s father who is still continuing his research (which failed to save fitch) to grow human organs in pigs – when one of the pigs “Snortorious” suddenly develops human consciousness and speech .eventually realising (hence the Ishiguro links) the purpose for which he is being bred but not after a rather excrutiating part when he realises that humans eat pigs.

“Elegy Hotel” is one of a number of stories which explore, with Atwood-esque naming, how capitalism quickly adapts to profit from death and grief – here with a hotel which allows people to spend time with their loved ones dead bodies. Dennis is a worker in the hotel and befriends another worker Val, but to her despair refuses to repair a breach with his brilliant scientist brother Bryan which leads to Den not being around for the death of either of his parents.

“Speak, Fetch, Say I Love You” is another rather twee tale – a widower and now single parent has a reputation for repairing robo-dogs which people are increasingly using to preseve the memories of their loved ones (by getting them to programme the dogs for speech and actions before they pass) but increasingly finds the pets (including one he and his son have to remember his wife) are beyond repair.

“Songs of Your Decay” is about a female forensic scientist Aubrey whose work is now focused on watching the decay of the bodies of virus victims who give their bodies to science – she falls for one dying victim Laird and prefers listening to 80-90s music with him to spending time with her Doctor husband Tatsu.

“Life Around The Event Horizon” is where the book veers into Dr Who territory – the narrator is actually Dennis’s brother Bryan – who with the help of his post doc assistant (now second wife) Theresa (who corrected a crucial error in his calculations) seems to have discovered the black-hole based key to intergalatical travel via a singularity in his head!

“A Gallery A Century, A Cry A Millennium” is about the launch of a subsequent starship which goes in search of other planets – the crew (the adults of who are wakened from cryogenic suspension when the ship approaches a feasible system) include Miki, Yumi, Dorrie, Val and Bryan’s son. At one stage they find a deserted system-less rogue planet which seems as “old as the universe” and is covered with sophisticated ruins. Each time they wake time on earth has advanced tens if not hundreds of years (including finding a cure for the plague).

“The Used-To-Be-Party” is a short story of one of a number of people woken from comas/suspension post a cure but now finding themselves largely bereft of their loved ones – the narrator decides to organise a neighbourhood get-together for those like him.

“Melancholy Nights In a Tokyo Virtual Café” is told in the third person and is set in a future Japan ripe with post-plague unemployment. Akira finds himself drawn to a neighbour but only via a VR app – and then in rather odd circumstances encounters her estranged father in real life.

“Before You Melt Into The Sea” is a short but striking story of mourning rituals – where the narrator specialises in making and launching on the sea ice sculptures of the liquified remains of victims.

“Grave Friends” has some autobiographical elements – it is about an American based Japanese girl who returns to her family (who seem part of some shared burial urn society cum cult) after the death of her grandmother (who seems to be the child of the third story)

“The Scope of Possibility” returns us firmly to Dr Who territory and rather cleverly ties the full story together (including explaining both recurrent motifs and some, if not all,, of the oddities and anomalies in other stories) while crucially showing this unique and striking book’s key message - that loss and grief is simultaneously timeless and universal – and yet immediate and personal.

This was an interesting read, enjoyed the various different story lines. It was nothing like I thought it would be, but overall an enjoyable read.

This is a beautifully written book that takes you on an epic journey through time and space. We start at the beginning of a pandemic and travel through time as we experience the aftermath, and consequences of the virus but ultimately it is about the people and their relationships and how they survive these times. It is told through individual character stories that all loosely relate to one another. This perhaps will be a difficult read for some but it is a good read.

This book focuses upon a devastating plague, that is released through the melting of the Arctic ice. I initially felt uncomfortable reading this, with the idea of a global pandemic hitting a little too close to home. However, it is thankfully lacking in similarities to covid 19, or any other pandemics that we have experienced, overall an enjoyable read!

The idea of a world in crisis thanks to a virus is so very timely, considering the first draft was written just as the pandemic started. I’ve read many good books and interesting stories recently, but this was different. This was extraordinary writing, on par to some of the greatest classics.

I’m not a fan of using things like climate change as entertainment purposes, but Sequoia uses it so well. He isn’t throwing it down your throat or making it obvious, but it is a future we may all face in the years to come, and it will affect more than just our current livelihoods.

The link between the stories aren’t always obviously clear in the physical sense, instead their linked by the grief and the hardships and the love experienced by each main character. At first, it wasn’t clear if it was the same protagonist in each story - turns out it’s not - but this didn’t matter. If anything, it really showed that link between us all, connected through all time and space. They’re smart stories ranging from the uncomfortable near-future to the unrecognisable futuristic.

The concept of a euthanasia theme park for children is altogether fascinating but horrific. There have been times where I wish I could have helped put relatives out of their misery, but the idea of sick children being put on rollercoasters to stop their hears is too painful to dwell on.

The humanity of the pig story is also so beautiful but uncomfortable. There’s a lot of that in this book: uncomfortable, unusual, unacceptable, that are equally beautiful and heart warming and truthful. It’s everything wrong with the world, packaged up in a box. A box we’re trying to open and fix. Sequoia is holding our hands and giving us a tour of the hardships of life, keeping hold when it starts to get difficult.

As uncomfortable as it may seem, a positive for me is how freely death is spoken about. As a whole, humans (especially us in the UK) don’t talk about death, even when it’s staring at us in the face. It’s almost like we believe if we don’t talk about it, it won’t happen. But in this book, it is openly discussed in the same way you may discuss your dinner plans or your next holiday, and I think that’s beautiful.

I tried to read this as slowly as I could, because I couldn’t bear the idea of finishing it - it was such a joy to read. It’s amazing how all the stories come back on themselves, emphasising the idea that we’re all linked, wherever or whenever we live.

This is such a mart novel but without ego. It is compassionate and honest and to me, Sequoia only wants to portray the heart and soul of the story. Forget about it being a work of art, or a shoo-in for writing awards. It is a book that means so much more to us. A book that reaches our hearts and sets up home.

Arguably a pandemic novel isn’t the smartest choice of reading when recuperating from covid… but whilst the impact of the global pandemic can be inferred, Nagamatsu’s novel paints a much broader picture than yet another lockdown narrative. Loosely connected stories tell the story of a pandemic from virus discovery onwards, and with a moving focus on how civilisation responds to death at both personal and corporate level. The theme park chapter is a brilliant and awful concept, I was very impressed and was sold from here on in. The loose interconnectivity between chapters is enjoyable,
Tracking characters and themes through the years and decades.

Downside - I’m not sure about the final chapter; I initially felt it undermined what I’d read but concluded that it just wasn’t what I expected. It’s left me thinking about it though and that may be part of the point

The first thing I thought when I started this book was who in their right mind would release a book about a pandemic - in a pandemic! I read this book several weeks ago and have only come to review it now because it took me a while to gather my thoughts about it. Firstly, I must say it is beautifully written but that is where my praise for it ends. The book is a group of stories about a global pandemic which affects children, and the characters in each story are loosely connected. You start off reading it and it takes you into the depths of human despair - everything that is bad about the human race. As you continue to read each story, you think that at some point at least one of them will have a remotely happy ending - don't hold out for this. I can honestly say this is the most depressing book I have ever read. If you thought the Covid-19 pandemic was a disturbing and tragic event, this book makes it seem like a walk in the park. Then there is the 'twist' at the end - turns out that all along an alien life form has been living amongst us to try to show humans the error of their ways (at least that's what I think the point of the alien was!). Would I recommend this book - no. Would I buy it for a friend - definitely not, unless I wanted to tip them over the edge. At disturbing story at the best of times but I would say it is almost irresponsible to release it during the current world climate.

I think this book would have been better if the blurb had not compared it so much to other books. These kinds of comparisons, especially when I love the other books, set the bar of expectation so high that if the book does not exactly match what I expect, I end up feeling disappointed. There was a lot that I liked about the book, but it's just nothing like Cloud Atlas or Station Eleven. And that's fine, but I expected something like that.

So the book itself was ok, I found it quite verbose and that often in quite an annoying way. I couldn't help but think at times I was being preached at a little. The different voices never really came together for me, so the overall experience was disjointed and alienating, the latter may well have been intentional.

In short, this was not for me.

How High We Go In The Dark is a strangely compelling set of loosely interconnected stories set in the aftermath of a global pandemic and covering centuries of human existence.


It is full of humanity and emotion that you get caught up in as it moves seamlessly through years and people, offering a snapshot view, a kind of drop in on individual lives and struggles.

The writing has a beautiful cadence and lyrical rhythm that keeps you hooked throughout- it is melancholy and intriguing, offering something a little different with every tale told, a mixture of voices and experiences, a darkly imaginative novel of hope of a sort.

Different to my usual reads, recommended for fans of the existential and deeply affecting narrative.

Another day another pandemic novel written I assume before Coronavirus and now dealing with a world where we know the shape of a particular pandemic and are possibly not minded to delve into another one. What is interesting here (and Autonomy which also had a pandemic theme), is the slightly magical weirdness of the pandemics involved. No pulminory lung collapses here, instead organs start to go missing, or start to change into other organs, or at one point – a singularity black hole turns up in someone’s body. It’s a solid hint that this is not hard science fiction, rather some what ifs. Its also not a standard novel, it is rather a set of linked short stories moving through the timeline of Earth after this pandemic appears. So we definitely get into the “living with the disease” moment we know at the moment.

The “connected short story” novel is hard to pull off because like any set of short stories some will work better than others. Have too strong a character in one and you mourn not seeing them again. Be too tangentially connected and it feels like its falling apart. And whilst the core of this takes place in the ten years after the pandemic breaks, there is one at the dawn of humanity and some very far future work. Luckily though Nagamatsu nailed my interest with the second chapter/story here – the first was a solid “we’ve found something in the ice” story, the second constructed the melancholy framework the book leant on. “City Of Laughter” does the heavy lifting of describing the pandemic which affects children the worst, and to a point when they aren’t in particular pain but know they are very close to death. And so the city sets up Euthanasia Theme Parks, a logical endpoint to Make A Wish Foundation views of children’s suffering. The kids get to spend a magical day at the theme park and then go on a rollercoaster that kills them with G-Forces. The story is narrated by an out of work actor who ends up as a character mascot and host at this Disneyland of Death, and it manages in is short length to be poignant about his own disappointing life, the pandemic, and attitudes of death. After this story I was in for the rest of the book no matter what.

And the rest is a mixed bag. There are some more low level wonder stories (a heartbreaking one about an intelligent pig), and a few more big picture ones – the escape to space. But it is an impressive collection which hangs together thematically as a novel, with the mixture of sadness and acceptance overwhelming the big ideas in most places. The subtext I took away was that the world is a wonderful place we are cursed to live in, and pandemic or not this feeling will linger for a while.

This story begins with a deadly global pandemic which is unearthed by the melting permafrost in the Arctic Circle and the grotesque aftermath that reverberates for generations to come. Very timely!

Told from multiple points of view, the stories span throughout multiple lives, traveling into various dimensions of space and time.

As a massive fan of Jeff Van der Meer this was right up my street!

I was about to give this book four stars because of the way the ending threw me off and I struggled to see how it connected to the rest of the story (for me, it kind of ruined the message I was getting), but the overall reading experience was so good that I decided to give it five stars anyways. It was a very emotional read and I cried a lot, but in a way that was incredibly enjoyable.

How high we go in the dark follows a diverse cast of characters who are all trying to survive through a terrible pandemic and its aftermath, climate change destroying the world, and, most importantly, grief. Grief for the people they could've been, the lives they might have led, the better choices they should've made. All of the stories are connected, but they are unique enough that it truly feels like they represent the diversity of people when dealing with hard times. Even though none of the characters really get that much time, they all feel like real, three-dimensional humans, and it was impossible not to empathize with them.

The way Nagamatsu presents the grim future doesn't seem too unrealistic, especially now that we've seen how humanity really deals with a pandemic. The scenarios depicted really help understand the characters, and it feels as if there is an (excellent) study of grief being done all throughout the book, but not in a way that takes readers out of the story.

As for what I mean about the ending, it's a big spoiler, so feel free to skip this paragraph. In the last chapter, it is revealed there's a sepcies of "superbeings" that supervise the creation of life around the universe, and one of them lives on Earth. She is responsible for the pandemic that destroyed humanity, but also for some great discoveries. This made it feel like the overarching message of humanity's resilience and will to live, explore, and get better was conditioned by someone better than us watching from the shadows, ready to intervene if we were to stray too far off the right path. But as I said, the book is still incredible, and if you lean more towards fantasy the ending might make it even better for you.

All in all, I loved this read. At some points it even reminded me of Record of a spaceborn few by Becky Chambers, which is one of my favorites. If you need something that will make you let out a good cry while picking up your spirits, this is definitely the perfect read.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review this book.

I enjoyed many things about this - it is basically custom-made for me after all. I loved the changing perspectives as we moved further into the future, I loved revisiting people from earlier chapters as side characters in the later chapters, I enjoyed the weirdness Nagamatsu embraced and how unlikable he lets his characters be - but I did not love this book as a whole the way I wanted (and honestly expected) to. Parts are to do with the prose that did not always work for me, parts are definitely the increasingly bleak outlook of the stories. Overall, I found this slightly uneven but in parts genuinely brilliant.

This absolutely broke me- maybe not the best choice to read during an ongoing pandemic but still utterly haunting. Nagamatsu's compliation of stories is haunting and gripping, and definitely has important, sometimes eeerily prescient things to say about our current state and the way we go forward from here.

There seem to be two dominant schools of thought as to how the Covid pandemic is going to affect literature, from an artistic rather than an economic point of view. Will readers want to avoid anything disease and pandemic-related, opting instead for escapism from the defining event of this generation or will writers be obligated to engage with it in one form or another? How High We Go In The Dark falls emphatically into the latter category, despite ranging pretty high in terms of speculative flights of fancy.
But it’s perhaps unfair to label it a ‘Covid novel’ as the Sequoia Nagamatsu goes to great pains to emphasise that this is a work that was 10 years in the making. And indeed, it’s no quick cash-in by any means. While not a big book, it’s dense with ideas and is often engrossing in the depth of emotion it offers the reader. There’s definitely more than a few heart-tugging moments, although equally there are points where it occasionally overreaches into mawkish sentimentality. Equally, while a great many of the social and technological concepts it posits as being consequences of a global, lethal pandemic are fascinating and well thought out, some fail to hit home quite as well.
This is probably as much to do with the novel’s structure as much as anything else. It’s been compared to Cloud Atlas and it’s certainly reminiscent of David Mitchell’s early works, although a case could possibly be made for it being a close-ish relative of some of Ray Bradbury’s themed short story collections. It’s made up of a number interlocking short stories set in this world of global pandemic and with many characters recurring, often in slightly surprising ways. This is a strength as much as a weakness, of course, and some of the stories are highly affecting. And the variety helps provide some relief when the novel goes into really very dark, even despairing, territory, offering the reader flashes of hope among the darkness.
For this is a novel that’s very much about death, far more than it’s purely about disease or pandemic. It explores — and in some depth — not just our individual reactions to death, but also just how much our human society is built around our preoccupation with our own mortality. Thus we’re given theme parks for terminally ill children to spend their final hours, elegy hotels where loved ones can ‘holiday’ with the dead and dying and VR worlds where people can seek out ‘suicide partners’ for when it all gets too much.
And if all that sounds a bit grim, as I said, there are flashes of hope among all the mortality. Family, birth, new life are all also major themes. There’s a literal seed of undying optimism and hope at the heart of the book too.
But the structure does ultimately work against the novel slightly. While it might superficially resemble the reconstructionist narratives of David Mitchell, How High We Go In The Dark doesn’t quite have the same tight tying up of the narrative that Mitchell imposed on his work. Not that it doesn’t have a resolution of sorts but it’s one of such a metaphysical and literally cosmic kind that it doesn’t somehow do justice to the earthy humanity of a great many of the stories that preceded it and while interesting it left this reader at least feeling slightly unsatisfied.
Nevertheless, Nagamatsu has crafted an ingenious and often highly emotionally affecting work and one that will leave you chewing over many of its fascinating and far-reaching ideas for weeks and months to come. They have also peopled this complex, and often very dark, reality with an impressively large cast of believably and humanly flawed characters. It’s a memorable and deeply compassionate work and as we attempt to reform our lives from our own pandemic experience, it’s one that’s very timely indeed.