This one is special.
I effortlessly fell into Chloe Benjamin’s novel Under Story. There’s not much of a plot to begin with—a woman arrives at an Antarctic research base. She is a scientist but she’s just there to basically wash dishes and try to be a non-person for a while.
The first 200 pages of the book breeze by in that way, but then the sci-fi premise officially kicks in and it becomes a full-on page turner.
I don’t want to give too much away. I will say that I could see the premise failing to draw in, or even totally repulsing, certain readers. It’s the kind of high-concept sci-fi—soft sci-fi, they used to call it, as opposed to the detail-oriented hard sci-fi that obsesses over reason and realism—that is better received as a metaphor than a worldbuilding premise. In other words, if you’re the kind of reader who picks nits with sci-fi, you will probably find this narrative too nit-stuffed to enjoy.
But if it works for you, this book will really work. It’s been ages since I found a premise that inspired me to reflect on my own life in a new way. If you’re someone who enjoyed The Time Traveler’s Wife, for instance, you’ll probably fall in love with this one.
I usually try to avoid being vague when I’m talking about a book, but trust me when I say that the less you know about Under Story, the more you’ll enjoy it. It has a lot of interesting points to make about destiny, commitment, grief, and love, and I’m fairly confident in saying that it is almost certainly going to be my favorite reading experience of 2026