For a slender book, Terrestrial History delivers an enthralling plot; complex, realized characters; and a wealth of fine-cut sentences ... Piercing, poetic.
A century-spanning, multigenerational saga about one family’s experiences with Earth’s unfolding climate catastrophe, an affecting, emotional story about loss, community, and the false promise that we may somehow be able to find a convenient escape from the consequences of our actions ... Reed deftly taps into our present anxieties, not just that of our worsening climate, but of our worsening relationship to one another.
Moving and intelligent ... [A] richly drawn family history ... Reed uses the multivocal structure to great effect ... The novel is a triumph of the climate fiction genre ... A brilliant exploration of time and the possibilities inherent in any vision of the future, Terrestrial History manages to be both hopeful and devastating.
Reed makes the epic upheaval of climate change deeply and profoundly personal, driving home the looming tragedy through the plight of these four flawed and achingly human characters. A triumph.
A bleak, timely, and painstakingly imagined exploration of a future that none of us want ... Dancing between decades, characters, and planets, Reed’s latest may lack some of the lyrical beauty that marked his previous two books, but it succeeds in brilliantly dramatizing some of the great questions of our time.
British writer Reed (Hammer) delivers a satisfying work of climate fiction involving interplanetary time travel ... Reed puts his science fiction concepts in the service of intriguing philosophical questions (“What if time doesn’t move so cleanly forward, but jumps and jerks, blooms and shudders?”), and the conclusion packs an emotional wallop. Readers of slipstream fiction like Cloud Atlas will find a great deal to enjoy here.
