The Humans: A Novel

“I was not Professor Andrew Martin. That is the first thing I should say. He was just a role. A disguise. Someone I needed to be in order to complete a task.”

Before our hero is sent from his distant planet to Earth, his life is governed by perfection and precision. On his home world, mathematics has transformed his people, giving them the ability to create a utopian society where knowledge is limitless and immortality is attainable. But when Cambridge professor Andrew Martin cracks the Reimann Hypothesis, opening a doorway to the same technology that the alien’s planet possesses, the narrator is sent to Earth to erase all evidence of the solution and kill anyone who had seen the proof. The only catch: the alien has no idea what he's up against among the humans.

Disgusted by the excess of disease, violence, and even noises he encounters, he struggles to pass undetected long enough to gain access to Martin’s research. What he doesn’t count on is having to blend in with Martin’s family—his angry wife, Isabel, shamed by Martin’s affair with a student; and his son, Gulliver, for fifteen years deprived of his father’s love and attention. But in picking up the pieces of Martin’s shattered personal life, the narrator begins seeing a kind of hope and redemption in the humans’ imperfections themselves, and questions his marching orders. Mathematics or no, he becomes increasingly convinced that Isabel and Gulliver deserve to live.

Deliciously witty and darkly insightful, The Humans offers an unlikely story about human nature and an unusual celebration of the joy that is in the very messiness of life on Earth a funny, compulsively readable tale certain to win the hearts of Matt's fans and new audiences alike.