The Humans

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So yeah, needless to say, if you're in a sci-fi/literary fiction mood, you just need to give it a shot! I put absolutely everything I had into it so if people don’t like it then they don’t like me, because all the best things I have to offer the world are inside its pages.

This book is full of thought-provoking statements about what it means to be human, and what love is, and human life and death. You would notice that the tone of the story was very consistent from end to end, but it acquired more emotion as the events flowed. Haig displays a wise understanding of the human condition and exploits to the hilt the vantage point that he has given his narrator. The alien entity who looks like Andrew Martin is believed to have undergone a concussion, making Andrew seem to behave oddly, sure, but he's also a good listener, he asks charming questions, he heals, he cares, and he is fascinated by everyday wonders.

For all its later outbreaks of Vonnadorian mawkishness, The Humans still deserves to live long and prosper. Matt Haig is not afraid of a sweeping generalisation any more than he is afraid of peculiar specifics… But this bravado is what makes the book work. As a black hole forms it creates an immense gamma-ray burst, blinding whole galaxies with light and destroying millions of worlds. My main problems with this book come down to the suspension of disbelief and the constant attempts at being witty and quirky.

I would have liked an entire book of this: just a doofy alien in human form walking around the modern world trying—and failing—to make sense of it. This hypothesis involves prime numbers and the rate at which the amount of prime numbers become smaller as numbers get larger(which numbers grow to infinity).Much of the first half of the novel is taken up by his puzzled analyses of primitive human ways: the nightly news, he reckons, should be renamed The War and Money Show; getting drunk is how humans forget they are mortal, while hangovers are how they remember. Although I did not hate the book there were too many aspects of the story that just annoyed me no end.