Chloe Benjamin

Book Review: UNDER STORY by Chloe Benjamin

| Jessica Crawford

Under Story by Chloe Benjamin is a 512 page standalone novel published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 2026.

Genre

Literary Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction

Description

The New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists returns with an intimate yet epic love story—and a sweeping odyssey of scientific discovery. Under Story invites us 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, cementing Chloe Benjamin’s place among our best, and most lasting, storytellers.

“We wake up to tomorrow, never yesterday.”

At the end 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, a husband, and a family.

But even in this remote outpost, Laurel can’t outrun 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.

Opening Line

Laurel’s first memories of soil–though at the time, she would have called it dirt–came from weeding in her mother’s garden.

My Thoughts

She must remind herself that words like beginning and end, one and two, are a matter of perspective. A line implies before and after; a circle says, And then, and then…

Laurel is a mycologist who leaves her university professorship to wash dishes at a research station in Antarctica after a tragedy leads to the dissolution of her marriage. The isolation and stark beauty of the location suits her, and she makes some good friends. Then a color-changing Arc appears over the icy expanse. Her ex-husband Eli is one of the physicists sent to study the unexplained phenomenon, and the two of them eventually realize the Arc might in fact represent the second chances in life that they had been hoping for.

This reflective and emotional book uses speculative science fiction as a tool to closely examine life, love, and grief. The author incorporated things that have caught her fancy throughout her life as building blocks to craft this moving tale: namely the interconnectedness of all lifeforms (highlighted most particularly here with the relationship between trees and fungi), and results from research performed in Antarctica linked to a theory of a mirror universe. If such a thing were to exist, what kind of opportunities might it present?

Maybe catastrophizing is like freezing a photon in flight: if you fixate on one outcome, all of the others collapse. That’s what fear does, she thinks. It makes you pick a story. If the stays open, the future might hold everything at once.

The beginning of the book (Laurel going to the ends of the Earth to escape her known life with its painful truths) was very good, and the end was pretty excellent (considering topics such as what makes for a meaningful life, and what is “enough”), but the story did drag a bit for me in the middle. I also side-eyed a few details here and there. Even still, I teared up several times during its telling, which for this reader is a sign of success!

And how absurd it is, the bargain of life: that we should be gifted love while guaranteed loss, love’s tax.

This book asks the question, how far would you go to get more time with a lost loved one? I don’t think this will be an all-time favorite like Benjamin’s The Immortalists was for me, but is definitely a strong contender for one of my favorite reads of the year. (And considering these books in conjunction–wow, can this author write, but man, who did she lose?)

Major content warning here for the death of a child

Book Review: THE IMMORTALISTS by Chloe Benjamin

| Jessica Crawford

“The impossibility of moving beyond loss, faced against the likelihood you will: it’s as absurd, as seemingly miraculous, as survival always is.”

This book was near perfection.

In New York City in 1969, four siblings visit a mysterious woman who tells them the dates they will die. The rest of the book shows us how each of them chooses to live their lives in light of what they were told.

Was it just a scam? Could it be true? What if the dates of their deaths have been altered by the knowledge itself?

“Varya has had enough therapy to know she’s telling herself stories. She knows her faith-that rituals have power, that thoughts can change outcomes or ward off misfortune-is a magic trick: fiction, perhaps, but necessary for survival. And yet, and yet: Is it a story if you believe it?”

Loss is a big theme in this book, as well as the indomitable ties of family, and the difference between living and merely surviving. It’s not exactly an uplifting story, but it is often pure magic in the telling. We’re transported to San Francisco in the 1970s, where many people first felt it was okay to be gay; to magic shows that don’t aim only to create illusions, but to reveal truth; to labs where primates are used for research on aging; to family gatherings both joyous and fraught with tension, and more.

I adored so many of these characters. Simon and Klara’s parts of the book were my favorites, but Daniel and Varya’s were wonderful in their own ways. Raj and Ruby are lovely, too, and of course we can’t forget Gertie (“After everything I gave you: education, opportunity-modernity! How could you turn out like me?”)

It is worth it to note that, other than the possibility of the fantastical in a woman who may be able to see when you will die, this book is largely literary fiction, with its focus on family dynamics and loss.

Some lines remind me of the exact thoughts I had when my own sister passed away.

“She’d lost both him and herself, the person she was in relation to him. She had lost time, too, whole chunks of life that only [he] had witnessed…”

But the story does bring us ultimately to the fringes where grief meets healing.

“For so long, she stifled these memories. But now, when she calls them up in these sensory ways, so that they feel more like people than ghosts, something unexpected happens. Some of the lights inside her-the neighborhood that went dark years ago-turn on.”

I’ve included so many quotes in this review because the writing was just so exquisite and hard-hitting. I think I may now be an official Chloe Benjamin fan girl, and will make a point to read more of her work. And, because I can’t resist (and at risk of telling you nearly the whole darn story), I’ll end this review with yet more quotes from The Immortalistthat really spoke to me:

“His death did not point to the failure of the body. It pointed to the power of the human mind, an entirely different adversary-to the fact that thoughts have wings.”

 

“They began together: before any of them were people, they were eggs, four out of their mother’s millions. Astonishing, that they could diverge so dramatically in their temperaments, their fatal flaws-like strangers caught for seconds in the same elevator.”

 

“There were times he thought of his siblings and felt love sing from him like a shofar, rich with joy and agony and eternal recognition: those three made from the same star stuff as he, those he’d known from the beginning of the beginning. But when he was with them, the smallest infraction made him irreversibly resentful.”

 

“What will Klara tell her, with frantic and unheard insistence? To [her daughter], Klara’s past will seem like a story, Saul and Simon no more than her mother’s ghosts.”

 

“…Daniel couldn’t understand why they didn’t feel what he had: the regret of separation and bliss of being returned. He waited. After all, what could he say? Don’t drift too far. You’ll miss us. But as the years passed and they did not, he became wounded and despairing, then bitter.”

 

“[Her guilt] shrank…when she was hungry, which she so often was-there were times when she felt light enough to drift toward the sky, light enough to drift toward her siblings.”

 

“‘I was afraid,’ she says. ‘Of all the things that can go wrong when people are attached to each other.'”

In case you couldn’t tell, I really loved this book!