So long, and Thanks For All The Fish

The fourth book in Douglas Adams's "trilogy in five parts" is the most romantic and unexpectedly tender of the saga. After years of being flung around the cosmos, Arthur Dent finally comes home — to an Earth that is somehow, impossibly, still there, humming along as if it had never been demolished at all. No one seems to remember the Vogons, the dolphins are gone, and Arthur has no idea how any of it is possible.

Then he meets Fenchurch, a young woman with her own strange sense that something about the world is not quite right, and against all cosmic odds, Arthur falls in love. Their gentle, offbeat romance unfolds alongside a lingering mystery about the fate of the dolphins and a message the Earth may have been trying to deliver all along — while Ford Prefect, elsewhere, senses that something about this restored planet is deeply suspicious.

Warmer and quieter than the books before it, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish trades some of the interstellar mayhem for heart, without losing Adams's singular wit.