The Humans

Product Information

The way this alien views humanity cracks me up because he doesn't understand anything about our people or our world, and seeing him experience humanity for the first time was so entertaining. I know that I’m for sure going to read more books of Matt Haig’s now, because he’s simply too good an author to not be further explored.

However, it's a mark of how funny and clever the rest of his novel is that Haig just about gets away with the love-is-truth guff.The narrator decides to give some advice to fellow humans and comes up with some cliched (yet wise) gems. It's just the pure number of them (and a little bit of me felt the author was trying to be clever by attempting to use science too) constantly jarred me. Matt Haig is a clever author to have written it, and I loved how he - together with his multiple observations on the human race - was able to provide us with some truths on life and how we live it that you don’t often think about in everyday life. You will be convinced the author himself is from another world, sent here to give us some wisdom, but perhaps also fearful if we can handle it.

While science fiction isn’t my go-to genre, I found The Humans to be very accessible given its present-day Earth setting. Haig handles the complexities of this and of all the challenges of the bizarre situation with heart, some wry humor, and with thoughtfulness.I am always torn with Haig's work, it reads and feels like a top quality Hallmark movie, but always gives me the sense of trying too hard to be such. Professor Andrew Martin of Cambridge University, one of the great mathematical geniuses of our time, has just discovered the secret of prime numbers, thereby finding the key that will unlock the mysteries of the universe, guarantee a giant technological leap for mankind and put an end to illness and death. I believe that it's thanks to books I survived those days, I'm not sure how I'd have coped without books giving me a respite from my at times overwhelming reality.

Taking the form of Professor Andrew Martin, a prominent mathematician at Cambridge University, the visitor is eager to complete the gruesome task assigned him and hurry home to his own Utopian planet, where everyone is omniscient and immortal. A novel with an enormous heart, infused with a sense of gratitude for everything that makes us who we are. Originally disgusted by humans, the alien begins to become attached to the Professor’s wife and son, where he gets another mission to kill the two. Andrew Martin is a brilliant mathematician who solves the Riemann hypothesis which will change the world as we know it.

But although I liked this book for being about humans from a non-human angle and the insight that allowed, sometimes the tone of it felt overexplainy and most of the time I was a little bored. Which might also explain why to look at such natural beauty was to also feel sadness and a craving for a life unlived. It will have you laughing, give you goosebumps, make you gasp, bring a tear to your eye, and warm you from the inside out. With my grief not being a linear process there are days when I am hit again with an almost unbearable sadness.