Under Story: A GMA Book Club Pick
Under Story: A GMA Book Club Pick
by Chloe Benjamin
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About the Book
GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK
The New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists returns with an intimate yet epic love story—and a sweeping odyssey of scientific discovery. Under Story invites us to consider the promise of this life, what might lie beyond it, and how far we would go for more time with the people we love, cementing Chloe Benjamin’s place among our best, and most lasting, storytellers.
“We wake up to tomorrow, never yesterday.”
At the edge of the world, biologist Laurel Salter is hiding from everything she’s ever known. For ten hours a day, six days per week, she works as a dishwasher at McMurdo Station, an isolated research base in Antarctica. She tells no one that before she arrived, she was a renowned young scientist with a promising career and a family.
But even in this remote outpost, Laurel can’t escape her past. When a strange light appears across the ice—and draws a group of physicists to McMurdo—her former husband, Eli, won’t be far behind. Laurel is captivated by the Arc: its surreal glow; the way it seems almost alive. And though Eli is reluctant to test her wildest theory, Laurel is convinced that the Arc leads down a rabbit hole and into a world they can barely imagine. Can she persuade him to risk everything to fix the burden that hangs between them—to turn back the clock and live their story a second time?
A breathless page-turner and a love letter to our planet, Under Story grapples with the great questions of our time: human hubris, the precarity of the natural world, and the mysterious webs of consciousness that bind us. A modern epic of science and soul, of bravery and redemption, it offers a vision of the future that demands we reckon with what we owe to one another, and to the earth itself.
About the Author
Chloe Benjamin is the author of The Immortalists, a New York Times bestseller, and The Anatomy of Dreams. A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, LibraryReads favorite, and #1 Indie Next pick, The Immortalists was named a best book of 2018 by NPR, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, and others. The Anatomy of Dreams received the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award and was longlisted for the 2014 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Originally from San Francisco, CA, Chloe is a graduate of Vassar College and the M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Wisconsin. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives with her husband in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Editorial Reviews
GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK
“[An] expansive speculative saga… Benjamin could have written a far shorter novel. Some may say that less is more. But “Under Story” isn’t meant to be a minimalist work.Leaning away from her austere contemporaries, Benjamin delights in the details of love and the everyday world, the smell of Laurel’s family’s apple orchard, communal living, the discovery of letters, unexpected second chances. Like Laurel and Eli, Benjamin wants so much more from this life than what we’re offered — she wants to embrace the interconnectedness of nature and humanity. Ever-shifting and blooming with tremendous tenderness, Under Story expands our expectations of living.” —New York Times Book Review
“An ambitious and fantasy-inflected adventure story that unfolds in parallel universes.” —Wall Street Journal
“[An] elegant blend of realistic fiction and uncanny sci-fi. [Benjamin’s] third novel is a beguiling, unpredictable study in sorrow and an uplifting ode to nature’s regenerative genius…Smart and wonderfully strange, Benjamin’s novel is a paean to life’s impermanence and to its capacity for renewal.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“So thought-provoking, and twisty that you won’t want the book to end.” —Los Angeles Times
“an epic sci-fi love story” —NPR
“Part science epic and part sweeping love story, Chloe Benjamin’s latest novel is an ode to the natural world and humanity’s place within it… Under Story grapples with the unknown, ultimately delivering a powerful message on the precarious and precious nature of the universe and human life itself.” —Harper’s Bazaar
“Soulful sci-fi…[An] astounding, mind-bending story about the lengths we’ll go to for the people we love.” —Real Simple
“Lives converge, and so do timelines, at a remote Antarctic base in this sweeping novel about family, loss, love and time from the author of The Immortalists.” —Today.com
“Under Story is an astoundingly imaginative and immersive work of fiction that veers off any sort of traditional pathway and takes us all the way to a parallel universe… There is almost a hallucinogenic quality to Benjamin’s prose that is both mystical and reality based.” —Book and Film Globe