At the edge of the world, biologist Laurel Salter is hiding from everything she’s ever known. For ten hours a day, six days per week, she works as a dishwasher at McMurdo Station, an isolated research base in Antarctica. She tells no one that before she arrived, she was a renowned young scientist with a promising career and a family. But even in this remote outpost, Laurel can’t escape her past. When a strange light appears across the ice—and draws a group of physicists to McMurdo—her former husband, Eli, won't be far behind. Laurel is captivated by the Arc: its surreal glow; the way it seems almost alive. And though Eli is reluctant to test her wildest theory, Laurel is convinced that the Arc leads down a rabbit hole and into a world they can barely imagine. Can she persuade him to risk everything to fix the burden that hangs between them—to turn back the clock and live their story a second time?
Expansive ... The novel’s success hinges on your ability to suspend your disbelief as profoundly as you draw upon your capacity to love. With the portals and time travel, the story requires an open mind. Even with such a fantastical plot, Benjamin draws complex, deeply human characters ... Benjamin could have written a far shorter novel. Some may say that less is more. But Under Story isn’t meant to be a minimalist work ... Expands our expectations of living.
A beguiling, unpredictable study in sorrow and an uplifting ode to nature’s regenerative genius ... Without spoiling the book’s many surprises, it’s fair to say that by design, much of the action contradicts the empirical truths that govern our lives. Some aspects of the story don’t quite cohere. But as a depiction of grief, it is attentive, nuanced and humane, a powerful portrait of a woman navigating the fraught distance between pain and healing ... Smart and wonderfully strange.
A 500-page melodrama of parental devotion and quantum hokum. Imagine Orpheus and Eurydice meets Interstellar, but starring Tom Hanks from Big ... lenty of imagined worlds are nonsense, and gloriously so. The problem is that Benjamin keeps drawing our attention to her shonky narrative machinery. She answers questions we’d never thought to ask ... She seems unsure her cosmic premise can carry its own mysteries. But the more we learn, the more distracted we are ... Part of the problem is length. Rewound life is a gimmick, a thought experiment. The books that do it best are wry, incisive and short.
