Chloe Benjamin

×

Expand

David Enloe

A close-up of Chloe Benjamin.

Chloe Benjamin

Chloe Benjamin’s second novel, The Immortalists, was a New York Times bestseller during her time living in Madison. Now living in the San Francisco area, Benjamin returns to Madison for a Wisconsin Book Festival talk about her new novel, Under Story, which employs a fantasy premise (alternate universes) to explore big themes including love, parenthood, nature and second chances. Read Michael Popke’s preview here.

media release: Full of wonder, heady exploration, and bold ideas, Under Story is at once a sweeping odyssey of scientific discovery, an intimate portrait of a tangled marriage, and a modern epic bursting with intelligence and warmth. While its scope is grand, Benjamin anchors her novel in the enduring love story between two gifted young scientists, Laurel and Eli. It is a masterful balancing act that cements her place among our best and most lasting storytellers. 

With Under Story, Benjamin invites readers to consider the promise of this life, what might lie beyond it, and how far we would go for more time with the people we love. What if tomorrow was already written, but yesterday was yours to change?

At the edge of the world, biologist Laurel Salter is hiding from everything she’s ever known. For ten hours a day, six days per week, she works as a dishwasher at McMurdo Station, an isolated research base in Antarctica. She tells no one that before she arrived, she was a renowned young scientist with a promising career and a family. But even in this remote outpost, Laurel can’t escape her past. When a strange light appears across the ice—and draws a group of physicists to McMurdo—her former husband, Eli, won't be far behind. Laurel is captivated by the Arc: its surreal glow; the way it seems almost alive. 

And though Eli is reluctant to test her wildest theory, Laurel is convinced that the Arc leads down a rabbit hole and into a world they can barely imagine. Can she persuade him to risk everything to fix the burden that hangs between them—to turn back the clock and live their story a second time?

A breathless page-turner and a love letter to our planet, Under Story grapples with the great questions of our time: human hubris, the precarity of the natural world, and the mysterious webs of consciousness that bind us. A modern epic of science and soul, of bravery and redemption, it offers a vision of the future that demands we reckon with what we owe to one another, and to the Earth itself.

In conversation with Christina Clancy.