How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

 genre: science fiction

When our story begins, a father has arrived in Siberia to take over the work of his recently deceased daughter, who passed away while studying what is revealed in the rapidly melting permafrost.  The unknown virus that is released from the team's findings and the resulting plague will change the course of human history.  In this series of short stories that are threaded together chronologically allow us to watch how we might handle this sort of new virus and the kinds of futures that are possible.

Ok, this was REALLY interesting.  I was vaguely disappointed the first time we jumped way forward in time but by the end I was sort of in awe of what I'd listened to. In the audiobook each different character is told by a different narrator and that definitely helped me to let the story move forward as a series of longer vignettes.  A few of them were a bit slow but the writing was always beautiful.  There is death here, everywhere.  Not always traumatic death, but I can't think of a story where loss and grief were not a part of the storyline.  It's a reflection of the ways we handle grief and the way we look at death - or how we might look at it differently. It's about the web that connects us all - the web that sometimes we don't even know is there.

I do recommend this.  I enjoyed the experience.