How High We Go in the Dark

When an ancient virus thaws out of the melting Arctic permafrost—uncovered at the site where a grieving scientist's daughter died doing the same research—it spreads into a plague that reshapes life on Earth for generations. How High We Go in the Dark follows the long aftermath through a chain of interlinked stories: a euthanasia theme park for terminally ill children, a talking pig engineered for organ harvest, funerary customs and grief economies remade by mass death, and a starship carrying humanity's hope outward.

Sequoia Nagamatsu's debut is a mosaic novel of speculative fiction that uses catastrophe to write about the most intimate things—parents and children, love and loss, the ways communities carry grief across time. Devastating and, finally, luminous, it finds unexpected tenderness in the dark.