About the book

In a hot and gritty city populated by super-intelligent robots called 'Hums', May seeks some reprieve from recent hardships and from her family's addiction to their devices.

She splurges on a weekend away at the Botanical Garden - a rare, green refuge in the heart of the city, where forests, streams and animals flourish.

But when it becomes clear that the Garden is not the idyll she hoped it would be, and her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a Hum of uncertain motives in order to restore the life of her family.

Gripping and unflinching, Hum is about our most cherished human relationships in a world compromised by climate change and dizzying technological revolution, a world with both dystopian and utopian possibilities.

Why we love it

Hum is a deeply unsettling and disturbing novel but in all the right ways. This is a book that will make you think and make you fearful, because it's just all so very believable.

Set in a near-future world, it's centred around a May Webb, a woman struggling to cope in a society where her roles as employee, wife and mother are all being gradually supplanted by artificial intelligence bots. Sound familiar? It's an extraordinarily relevant book at a time when the use of AI by both individuals and corporations is massively on the increase.

The storyline is tightly focused on one family over the course of a single week, so it's an incredibly intimate book where you really feel like you get to know May and her family. It's that sense of intimacy which magnifies how terrifyingly uncertain this future world is and how easy it might be to fall though the cracks when decisions are made by AI and not people.

The novel also touches on issues around identity, privacy, environmental degradation, rampant consumerism, toxic media and the financial uncertainty of the gig economy. It's a lot of big concepts for one book but it's done so skilfully and with such subtlety, shown almost entirely through the experiences of the Webb family, that there's never any risk of feeling overwhelmed by this future world. 

I devoured it in a single morning - I just couldn't put it down. It's a completely engrossing novel and an absolute must-read book for anyone who enjoys thought-provoking speculative sci-fi with a side of mystery and suspense.