Terrestrial History

Longlisted for 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

One of the Best Books of 2025: Washington Post • Esquire • New York Public Library • Chicago Public Library

A family saga following four generations on a time-bending journey from coastal Scotland to a colony on Mars.

Hannah is a fusion scientist working alone at a remote cottage off the coast of Scotland when she sees a figure making his way from the sea. It is a visitor from the future, a young man from a human settlement on Mars, traveling backwards through time to try to make a crucial intervention in the fate of our dying planet, and he needs Hannah’s help. Laboring in the warmth of a Scottish summer, Hannah and the stranger are on the path towards a breakthrough―and then things go terribly wrong. Joe Mungo Reed’s intricately crafted novel expands from this extraordinary event, drawing together the stories of four lives reckoning with what it means to take fate into their own hands, moving from the last days of civilization on Earth through the birth of another on Mars.

Roban lives in the Colony, one of the first generation born to this sterile new outpost, where he is consumed by longing for the lost wonders of a home planet he never knew. Between Hannah and Roban, two generations, a father and a daughter, face an uncertain future in a world that is falling apart. Andrew is a politician running to be Scotland’s First Minister. Andrew believes there is still time for the human spirit to triumph, if only he can persuade people to band together. For his starkly rationalist daughter Kenzie, this idealism doesn’t offer the hard tools needed to keep the rising floods at bay. And so, she signs on to work for a company that would abandon Earth for the promise of a world beyond―in contravention of all Andrew stands for.

In considering which concerns should guide us in a time of crisis―social, technological, or familial―and reckoning with the question of whether there is meaning to be found in the pursuit of salvation beyond success itself, Joe Mungo Reed has written a novel of elegiac wonder and beauty.

Joe Mungo Reed is the author of the novels Hammer and We Begin Our Ascent. He teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge and lives in London.