If you peer down the hill from Matt Haig’s immaculate townhouse in Brighton, you can see the sea, which today is shimmeringly blue under a hot sun. “We bought the house for that view,” he says as he answers the door, which is painted turquoise. Bright, alive, vibrant. Haig – novelist, self-help guru, periodic endurer of depression and anxiety – needs these colours, that view, this sun, even the statement-making front door. This book kind of reminds me of We Are the Ants in that way. It's a coming of age story that involves aliens... and it has an extremely negative and pessimistic view of the world and humanity, until the main character slowly reaches an arc when they realize how beautiful and wonderful and meaningful life on Earth can be. It has the same overall message, which is probably why I loved this book so much. plot - funny yet thought-provoking (i.e. a dark comedy). I was invested throughout the story, from its hilarious beginning, its riveting middle to its hopeful ending; Astute, drolly hilarious and occasionally beautiful, full of poignant and painful insight into what it is to be human. Jay Richardson The List

And for a while, as Matt Haig builds from this premise, it’s funny! The Humans begins quite wonderfully with the arrival of an alien who can barely disguise his contempt towards humans and believes clothing is optional. The humor works because of our extraterrestrial narrator's terrific voice, which is matter of fact and superior. For example, the first piece of “literature” he reads is an issue of Cosmopolitan, which leads to this pithy discussion of magazines: Magazines are very popular, despite no human’s ever feeling better for having read them. Indeed, their chief purpose is to generate a sense of inferiority in the reader that consequently leads to a feeling of needing to buy something, which the humans then do, and then feel even worse, and so need to buy another magazine to see what they can buy next. It is an eternal and unhappy spiral that goes by the name of capitalism, and it is really quite popular. I would have liked an entire book of this: just a doofy alien in human form walking around the modern world trying—and failing—to make sense of it.Haig strikes exactly the right tone of bemusement, discovery, and wonder in creating what is ultimately a sweet-spirited celebration of humanity and the trials and triumphs of being human. The result is a thought-provoking, compulsively readable delight. Starred Review, Booklist In his communications with his home world, our narrator is persistently reminded not to think of the humans as individuals but as a collective. Why is this so important to the hosts? What is so dangerous about thinking of humans as individuals? What does this emphasis say about Vonnadorian culture? I particularly liked the interactions with Newton the dog. We're never quite sure how much the alien projects his own feelings onto Newton, like any human would, or how much he perceives more about the animal then we are able to. Told through the romantic and curious perspective of an unnamed alien, Matt Haig’s The Humans is an honest and mostly-optimistic view on humanity, showing that hope and greatness could be found in our imperfections as individuals and as a whole. At the sub-atomic level, everything is complex. But you do not live at the sub-atomic level. You have the right to simplify. If you don’t, you will go insane.

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event--in the living act, the undoubted deed - there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! And then there was Newton, the family dog, who was the alien’s very first friend. It was just so adorable to find a man care for a dog as if they were equals. They shared peanut butter, walked outside, and “Andrew” told him about his secrets first. It was very realistic, in my opinion, because I talk to my dog too. Let’s just say that we could all find friendship in the most unlikely of people or creatures. Moore, Anna (17 November 2018). "Matt Haig: 'I wanted to end it all, but surviving and thriving is the lesson I pass on' ". The Guardian . Retrieved 9 April 2022. Shrigley, Matt Haig to Canongate". Archived from the original on 20 April 2010 . Retrieved 25 May 2010.What were some of the observations about humanity (or mathematics) that you found most/least interesting? When an extraterrestrial visitor arrives on Earth, his first impressions of the human species are less than positive. Taking the form of Professor Andrew Martin, a leading mathematician at Cambridge University, the visitor wants to complete his task and return home to his planet and a utopian society of immortality and infinite knowledge. New technology, on Earth, just means something you will laugh at in five years. Value the stuff you won’t laugh at in five years. Like love. Or a good poem. Or a song. Or the sky. But know this. Men are not from Mars. Women are not from Venus. Do not fall for categories. Everyone is everything. Every ingredient inside a star is inside you, and every personality that ever existed competes in the theatre of your mind for the main role. One day humans will live on Mars. But nothing there will be more exciting than a single overcast morning on Earth.

The humans is a funny story about an alien who is sent to Earth to take over the body of a mathematician who has proven a major hypothesis, that's said to be dangerous knowledge for an immature species such as us humans. The alien is supposed to eliminate all traces of that hypothesis by any means possible. The Humans is a laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable and impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin. Jeanette Winterson If there’s one thing I would want to change in this story, it would be the ending. It was a meaningful closure, but it could have been better if I saw more of it, like what would happen when he arrived at that place. One more chapter would have been so amazing.But the book asserts otherwise. It takes the position of the Melville quote. The main character breaks through the façade of time and distance to find “the reasoning thing.” And that was apparently love, family and a sense of belonging. Perhaps that was the author’s wish, to live in such a world. When he first meets humans, they appear to him extremely ugly; he finds their food disgusting and almost inedible; and he didn’t even know that they wore clothes: he himself appears nude and behaves in such an eccentric way that he lands up for a while in a psychiatric hospital – but, because he is such a fast learner, he soon gets himself discharged. The narrator went into a bookstore and saw a book by Isobel Martin, Andrew’s wife, briefly reading it. He tried to reach Andrew’s office but was caught by the police and was taken to the station. The narrator had a voiceless "briefing" telling him that he must comply with everything now, that he had a mission to fulfill, and that being afraid among humans was understandable. The narrator was made to put on clothes, at which he mused upon the importance and value of clothes among the human race. He realized that he had been arrested simply for not wearing clothes which surprised him. The policemen started questioning him and called in a psychiatrist when the narrator gave strange answers. The psychiatrist questioned him and admitted him to a psychiatric institution. The narrator met his (Andrew’s) wife for the first time who was very concerned about him and then she went home after they spoke for a while.