Under Story

I adored Under Story. It is genuinely a book like no other. It's huge, mind-stretching and profound, and yet it also contains the most beautiful details and observations, and those two things combined well are so rare. Also, as if that weren't enough, it's exquisitely written. I love the magical blend of science, humanity, and love (in all its forms), and the characters Chloe Benjamin introduces are so real, and so perfectly drawn, I feel as though I've known them all my life.

Chloe Benjamin has also joined the ranks of authors I trust implicitly. She is the most incredible storyteller and wherever she writes, I will follow. I can't wait to see where she takes us next!

Joanna Cannon, author of A Tidy Ending and The Trouble With Goats and Sheep

A human, warm and extremely ambitious book... there is a lot of beauty in the story Benjamin weaves

New Scientist

A fiendishly clever, utterly original novel that gets to the heart of what it means to be alive. Under Story is dazzling, it will change you

Emilia Hart, Sunday Times bestselling author of Weyward and The Sirens

An epic story of love and loss and how the ties that bind us stretch across all boundaries. I loved it so much and found myself thinking about this wonderful novel even when I wasn't reading it

Jennie Godfrey, author of The List of Suspicious Things and The Barbecue at No. 19

A mind-bending, head-popping sci-fi love story full of intrigue and tenderness

Claire Fuller, Author of Our Endless Numbered Days and Hunger and Thirst

Count on Benjamin to ask the big questions-what makes a life worth living? What is the nature of time? Where do we belong?-and entertain us fully all the while. Cannot wait to read...

Lit Hub, Most Anticipated Reads 2026

Under Story is a book that contains multitudes. Stunning and moving and ludicrously inventive, it's a remarkable feat of imagination. I've never read anything like it, and I won't soon forget it.

Bobby Palmer, author of Isaac and the Egg and Main Characters

The best book I have read in years, a brilliant speculative novel

Gillian McAllister, multi-million copy bestselling author of Wrong Place, Wrong Time

A head spinning novel, daringly imaginative. Even as she plays with physics and fantasy, Chloe Benjamin has much to say about the nature of friendship, family, mortality and love

Geraldine Brooks, author of A Year of Wonders

Chloe Benjamin is a time-bending, heart-breaking, head-spinning writer who has conjured an entire parallel universe to illuminate one family's loss. Under Story is the most imaginative novel I've read in a long time, and yet its scenes depicting the ordinary joys and sorrows of parenthood, marriage, and friendship are perhaps most magical. This speculative masterpiece has only one flaw: at 500 pages, it's much too short

Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Masterful, original, and powerful. Chloe Benjamin's Under Story is a mind-blowingly clever novel that packs an emotional punch. You'll be pressing copies into the hands of everyone you know

Lucy Clarke, author of The Castaways

I read books for a living and this is hands down the best thing I've read in 2026. A complete freaking masterpiece

Jordy Moblo, Jordy's Book Club

An epic, deeply moving (and mind-bending) story of healing, loss, mortality, love, connection, time. Staggeringly good. Chloe Benjamin is the queen of speculative fiction, and this is my book of the year

Will Dean, best-selling and award-winning author of The Last Thing to Burn

Under Story will make you believe that there could be another universe layered beneath our own, compel you to be attentive to yourself - both body and mind - and provoke you to marvel at the phenomena of the natural world. I hope this novel gets the attention it deserves. Part of the blurb reads: "Once read, never forgotten." I have to agree.

The Bookseller

Benjamin (The Immortalists) blends speculative fiction and romance in this sui generis story of an erstwhile couple who discover a parallel universe. Benjamin holds the reader's attention with well-conceived depictions of the Duoverse, where people age in reverse from death to birth, but the heart of the story is in Laurel and Eli's desperate attempt to mend their lives and recover their love. This captivates

Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

This captivating book is a love story at heart, but not a straightforward one. There are echoes of The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger in the way it explores the fragility and preciousness of love...... Although the premise of an anti-universe is pure sci-fi, the emotions are deeply human. This exploration of grief, time and connectivity expanded my mind in the very best way and I know I'll be thinking about it for a long time.

Good Housekeeping

This ambitious story may make you wonder about a parallel universe where another version of ourselves exists

PRIMA

Soulful sci-fi...[An] astounding, mind-bending story about the lengths we'll go to for the people we love

Real Simple

Under Story is a spectacular epic which grapples with big ideas: theoretical physics, a parallel universe, mortality, the nature of time, and what it is to be alive. Yet it is also an intimate story of a marriage, grief, and how far you would go for more time with the people you love. Benjamin is able to delve deep into the complexities of science and then swoop into the darkest corners of the human heart with profound tenderness. Do be warned that it will inspire both wonder at Benjamin's intellectual acrobatics and absolutely shatter your own heart. Mine is still recovering and I read it months ago

Bookbrunch

An terribly powerful love story, an intellectual challenge, replete with absolutely beautiful descriptions of nature and its wonders, and with ideas and scenes that will blow your mind, as you puzzle out a world where people age in reverse and undertakers are now overtakers, and your parents become your children. A truly towering achievement, both a tearjerker and a breathless thriller about science and human nature, with a set of characters who will linger in the reader's mind for a long time.

Crime Time, Book of the Month