The Humans

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of me is upset about this because it was so wonderfully brilliant and I need another right now, but the other 10% is happy because this is the only book that has brought me this much feeling to my life, and I can’t review Haig every week, can I? He repeatedly asks himself and others, what it is like to be human and as he learns about belonging and love, he eventually wants to become one. The two of them were famous in their fields of education, Isobel on history and Andrew on Mathematics, and as authors of bestselling books. He is disgusted by the way humans look, what they eat, and the wars they witness on the news, and is totally baffled by concepts such as love and family. I picked this book up because I saw it recommended by a booktuber, and I wasn't expecting that much going into it.

They have taken their home planet, the only one they have access to, and placed it on the road to destruction. With his experiences at the forefront of his mind, this book provides what you need to hear if you are suffering/ have ever suffered with depression. One of my favorites is this one: "A human life is on average 80 Earth years or around 30,000 Earth days.Astute, drolly hilarious and occasionally beautiful, full of poignant and painful insight into what it is to be human. In Matt Haig's The Humans , an extraterrestrial arrives on Earth with a mission: to kill the man who has achieved a mathematical discovery considered beyond what is appropriate for humans and for the planet. But he soon grows deeply fond of humans' capacity for forgiveness, for caring, and for hope--despite their finite life years. Matt Haig is not afraid of a sweeping generalisation any more than he is afraid of peculiar specifics… But this bravado is what makes the book work. For those that don’t know, a human is a real bipedal life form of midrange intelligence, living a largely deluded existence on a small waterlogged planet in a very lonely corner of the universe.

This is a tender, funny novel about the often irrational ways humans behave, written in accessible prose, and invites comparison with Mark Haddon and Patrick Ness. It will have you laughing, give you goosebumps, make you gasp, bring a tear to your eye, and warm you from the inside out. 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.

There are tons of quotes about how “love is life” and how “it’s only through our flaws that we can truly appreciate humankind. So we are given a picture of how alien the human race is at first glance, and how familiarity is the only way to reconcile with the many contradictions of the human condition, and how when you then look back, it is impossible to identify what exact elements turned you off in the beginning.