He drinks wine, reads Emily Dickinson, listens to Talking Heads, and begins to bond with the family he lives with, in disguise. Disguised as Martin, he drinks wine, reads poetry, develops an ear for rock music, and a taste for peanut butter. The beginning is delightful, since the alien in its human form walks around without clothes and is arrested. Haig was drinking too much – a factor in his breakdown – and starting to feel panicky and depressed.

In picking up the pieces of the professor's shattered personal life, the narrator sees hope and redemption in the humans' imperfections and begins to question the very mission that brought him there--a mission that involves not only thwarting human progress.On one page the alien was a naive blank slate, the next he had some prior knowledge suddenly, the next he was using keys with no problem. You know how you think your family is pretty normal until you bring someone over to meet them and you see everything and everyone anew through his eyes? We could try to explain it away by saying that they’re aliens and so they don’t think the way we do and maybe they don’t believe in preparation, but if they can’t think ahead to consider and want to avoid negative consequences, then they wouldn’t have cared about the potential destruction and mayhem earth could cause with its new mathematical knowledge. I found the alien's facination with mathematics to be a bit out there for me - I know music is supposed to be based on math etc but I still enjoy music without the math theorem behind it. At the end of the day, this novel had me genuinely caring for the characters involved and I didn't want to put it down towards the end.

He told the Financial Times that doing a second degree was a way of “putting off being an adult”; he delayed that step further by moving to Ibiza, where he worked for the party organiser Manumission – he is usually described as a bartender, but says his main job was selling tickets. I think this is a false dichotomy, but a relatable one, maybe, for those of us who are trying to do the dance between functioning and thriving.Love is truth") above the level of the " Desiderata" poster or the sort of wry and twinkly conclusions about what it means to be human that Spock was often subjected to at the end of a Star Trek episode.

Matt Haig is a must-read author for me, as his books make me feel understood, uplifted, and - you guessed it - human. UPDATE 01/03/18: It's been four years since I read this novel and it still remains one of my all-time favorite books. Reminded me of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: another British fish-out-of-water story told first-person by someone who has trouble understanding the people around him (in that case because of autism).The Humans gave him confidence and confirmed his new publisher’s faith in him; Reasons to Stay Alive, which was derived from a blog he wrote in 2014, established him firmly in the public mind as a teller of stories and an open, uninhibited, ego-free chaperone through the maelstrom of life. I'm not a religious person, but seeing that quote actually made me think for a minute, and see things in a new perspective. There was no immediate connection between drug-taking and the panic attack, he says – it occurred at 11am and he had not been taking drugs in the preceding period – but he sees the party lifestyle as part of the context of his breakdown.

Matt Haig is the bestselling author of several books including the Alex Award–winning The Radleys, Humans, and The Midnight Library. A brilliant exploration of what it is to love, and to be human, The Humans is both heartwarming and hilarious, weird, and utterly wonderful.The plot was very simple, I could see what needed to happen next, and yet it didn't happen for a long time. Haig uses the alien’s innocence mixed with intelligence to make the reader think about our basic values, social mores, and cultural aspects. The music-loving, eco-evangelising Haig is wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with the words “No music on a dead planet”. To supplement this lack of plot, Haig tries to explore the meaning of life through our bumbling old alien narrator, whose voice becomes instantly less charming as soon as he’s humanized. Humans, as a rule, don't like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead.