How High We Go In the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

 This book was recommended to me through tbr.co back in June. It has been a very turbulent year and I got behind. Very behind. I actually tried to start it at least three time before it took. That's not the book's fault. Sometimes it is just not the right time to read a story and you have to try again later. So, when things quieted down a little and I had a little more brain space, I tried again.

How High We Go In the Dark is a stand-alone novel that looks at first like a set of loosely connected short stories. It's a near future narrative where climate change is in full swing. The glaciers up around the Arctic Circle are melting and revealing long-buried remains. The story starts with a grieving archeologist who arrives at the Batagaika crater to finish his deceased adopted daughter's find - a preserved neandertal corpse of a young girl with some very unusal features. They also discover an ancient and deadly virus.

The rest of the stories are about the world after the virus gets out and infects the world population. Each chapter is a complete story on it's own and covers a large span of time dipping into different places with different sets of characters. What is masterful about this book is how the stories tie together. A side character from one story might be the primary character in a later one, or they might be the mother or friend of a main character. Honestly, it took me way too long to realize what Nagamatsu was doing and I have an impulse to start the book over again so that I can chart all the characters in all of the stories. 

The sheer variety of stories in this book make this an eclectic read and gives the narrative an unusal breadth of scope. There's space exploration, climate change, bio-agent terror, sociatal dystopian elements, mutation, and even possible aliens. There's a little bit of everything in there and somehow it all works together. Really, I am in awe. 

My recommender chose this for me because I liked Arkady Martine's books and the "Expanse" series. Both works are gritty drop you in the middle of a puzzle kind of stories.  They are on the more literary end of genre literature. How High We Go In the Dark fits nicely into the group.