UNDER STORY

A grieving scientist takes a perilous chance to change the past and future.

Benjamin’s epic new novel follows Laurel Salter, a 30-something scientist studying fungi, as she decides to upend her life by accepting a job at the McMurdo Station, a research base in Antarctica. Recently divorced from her physicist husband, Eli, and grieving an unimaginable loss, Laurel is drawn to the barren, isolated, and dark nature of the continent. Outside the station’s window, she notices “the Arc”—a mysterious dome of shimmering and color-changing light—in the distance. No one knows what the Arc is, how it was created, or what it means. As teams of scientists and physicists filter into the base to study the Arc, Laurel is paradoxically surprised and unsurprised to find Eli among them. The two are drawn together when the Arc reveals itself to be related to the Duoverse, an unproven scientific theory of Eli’s over which they had initially bonded. The Duoverse is the idea that the Big Bang created two universes: The universe, where time moves forward, and the antiuniverse, where time moves backward. Laurel sees the Arc as an opportunity to go back in time and space to prevent the tragedy that tore their lives apart. When Eli and Laurel make it to the other side, they must contend with a world that holds the promise of a new future—but ultimately does not belong to them. Benjamin’s imaginative rendering of the antiuniverse offers truly unique ways of thinking about time, nature, progress, duty, and aging. The novel, which ends rather abruptly after a 500-page lead-up, has a beautifully tender moment that brings the universes—and the two sides of the story—into perfect harmony. Blending literary fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and scientific research, Benjamin has created a genre-bending novel that is deeply concerned with the tenuous, mysterious, and enduring symbiotic relationship between humans and nature.

Ambitious, poignant, and deeply human.