A tense dystopian thriller set in a near-future where sophisticated artificial intelligence threatens human existence as we know it.” —TIME, “25 New Books You Need to Read This Summer”
"With propulsive intensity and extraordinary finesse and insight, Phillips keenly dramatizes the love and terror of parenthood in a poisoned, high-tech, yet not utterly hopeless world." —Booklist
“The world of Hum feels not too far from our present day reality. [Hum] makes you, the reader, deeply uncomfortable (in a good way) about the advances in AI and our dependence on technology.” —Town & Country, "The 39 Must-Read Books of Summer 2024"
“The true wonder of Hum lies in its chilling reflection of our present times. However, Phillips cuts through the bleakness of the fictitious world she has created by transporting readers deep inside May's psyche, the tumultuous beating heart of the novel, to witness the tender humanity no amount of technological advancement can destroy... an intriguing novel about motherhood set in a technologically advanced future.” —Shelf Awareness
“Phillips’ new novel again shows her talent for finding warmth, humanity, and connection within an all-too-conceivable dystopian landscape... Writing with precision, insight, sensitivity, and compassion, Phillips renders the way love and family bonds—between partners, parents and children, and siblings—can act as a balm and an anchor amid the buffeting winds of a fast-changing, out-of-control world. A perceptive page-turner.” —Kirkus (starred)
“Helen Phillips (The Need) imagines a dystopian future that’s about five minutes away, in which the very fundamentals of society have been shifted by climate change, AI, surveillance tech, and our relentless electronic devices. When a desperate mom agrees to a dangerous experiment, things get even darker.” —Goodreads, "Readers' Most Anticipated Summer Books"
"Hum is a prescient, unnerving and excellent novel of a future that seems frighteningly possible. It's the story, in part, of a mother just trying to make her family happy and how the world punishes her for it. Helen Phillips writes with sharp insight and sly humor, making her critique of our current moment feel timely and timeless." —Victor LaValle, author of Lone Women
"There’s a lot going on in this novel, but trust Helen Phillips to navigate it effortlessly.... It’s Anxiety Central, but in a good way." —Literary Hub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2024"
"What’s more intoxicating than a Helen Phillips novel? Her books have blown open the doors of what’s possible with the art of storytelling—and her latest, Hum, is her best work yet: one that captures, with fire and grace, our future and what it means to love, to persist, and to be human. This is a hold-your-breath book. Buckle up and get ready to deeply feel the joy—the thrill, the magic—of reading." —Paul Yoon, author of The Hive and the Honey
"A transcendent portrayal of artificial intelligence, love, the fate of families, and the emergence of synthetic beings beyond human imagination." —Clifford A. Pickover, author of Artificial Intelligence: An Illustrated History
"Hum is something special. Helen Phillips is something really special. This novel is gripping and a true page-turner that made me think about our current world in completely new ways. Ultimately and most importantly, I closed the last page with a profound, deep love for the simple, beautiful and very human lives we lead."
—Ramona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal
“An indelible family portrait and a narrative tour de force, Hum generates almost unbearable tension and unease from start to end. Stunning, strangely beautiful, and written from a place of deep compassion but also a clear and analytical eye. Helen Phillips, in typical bravura fashion, has found a way to make visible uncomfortable truths about our present by interrogating the near-future. I loved it.”
—Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times-bestselling author of Hummingbird Salamander
PRAISE FOR THE NEED BY HELEN PHILLIPS
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION
“Like parenthood itself, The Need is frightening and maddening and full of dark comedy...Phillips, as careful with language as she is bold with structure, captures many small sharp truths. She is very good on drudgery and tiredness and marital resentment... With forensic precision Phillips identifies the price a parent will pay for tuning out just for a second, because that will certainly be the second when someone rolls off the bed or gets a finger trapped in the door...Everyday life, here, is both tedious and fascinating, grotesque and lovely, familiar and tremendously strange.” —NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (EDITORS’ CHOICE)
“Brilliant...It’s not hard to see why high-wattage contemporaries like Lauren Groff and Emily St. John Mandel have lavished praise...a sort of narrative nesting doll, a story infused with both essential home truths and a wild, almost unhinged sense of unreality....What Helen Phillips (The Beautiful Bureaucrat) builds from the first paragraphs is too clever, and moves too quickly, to be easily ground down in a review. Even the vaguely unfinished ending, less a full stop than a sort of pregnant pause, feels somehow right; a fitting coda to her spare, eerie marvel of novel, both beautifully familiar and profoundly strange. (A–)”—ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
“If the challenges of parenting young children have ever driven you to the brink, you’ll recognize what’s happening to Molly Nye—for about 10 pages. This fever dream of a novel starts like a thriller (someone’s in the living room), morphs into speculative sci-fi (the intruder is from a separate universe) and ends up like nothing you’ve ever read before. In a good way.”—PEOPLE
“Molly’s struggle to remain her full self while giving so much of herself away is electrifying...Mothers will recognize so much in this fresh novel — but they aren’t the only ones who should read it. Phillips has found a way to make these experiences universal, acknowledging the importance of the other — the creature without whom none of us would exist.”—WASHINGTON POST
"A taut thriller...Between chills, readers will notice the pleasures of Phillips’s prose. Her style combines the sensibility of a poet with the forward drive of a thriller...Phillips’s crystalline style vividly evokes her characters. She draws them so precisely that before we know it, we’re deep inside their lives...[A] bewitching, fiercely original novel.”—BOSTON GLOBE
“Hyponotically eerie...An ode to motherhood and a nightmarish rendering of its ‘pleasures’ and pains...Phillips structures her astonishing fifth book in edge-of-your-seat mini-chapters that infuse domesticity with a horror-movie level of foreboding, reminding us that the maternal instinct is indeed a primal one.” —LEIGH HABER, O MAGAZINE
"The Need is a taut, thrilling rendering of motherhood at its most psychologically terrifying."—VANITY FAIR
