Earth 7

Earth 7

$32.40

Review Quotes: "Stellar and sweeping . . . part cosmic comedy and part dirge to our dying world."--Lincoln Michel, The New York Times Book Review"[A] mesmerizing gem of a novel."--Colin Dwyer, NPR"[Earth 7 is] about...

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Review Quotes:

"Stellar and sweeping . . . part cosmic comedy and part dirge to our dying world."--Lincoln Michel, The New York Times Book Review

"[A] mesmerizing gem of a novel."--Colin Dwyer, NPR

"[Earth 7 is] about love--between two people, yes, but also the broader, more universal love their work entails. After all, preservation of what was and hope for what will be are both acts of immense care for the world."--Ilana Masad, NPR

"Unferth's prodigious worldbuilding unfolds magically. . . . Profound, funny, alarming, and imbued with love and sorrow for our lost world. . . . [A] masterpiece of climate fiction. " --Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Unferth shines in her ability to craft relatable characters in extraordinary circumstances. . . . [ Earth 7] explores deep ontological questions about the nature of life. This is profound." --Publishers Weekly, starred review
" Earth 7 is an adventurous, wry, utterly human novel (that 'original root of sadness and wildness'), and it will be here long after we're gone." --D/Annie Liontas, Electric Literature
"Unferth follows her madcap present-day econovel, Barn 8, with a crystalline, poetic, witty, and haunting post-depopulation tale of loss, adaptation, unexpected beauty, and surpassing love. Every moment is enrapturing, every twist heart-seizing in this keenly imagined, ravishing, and profound celebration of life in extremis." --Booklist, starred review
"This is a truly glorious novel rife with the grief and loss of climate disaster and a deep love for humanity and our planet." --Yvonne C. Garrett, The Brooklyn Rail

"Unferth's latest is an ode to the rapidly fading diversity of life on our planet, the mourning we are left with, and the ultimate question: what does it all matter when our future is shattered? All heady ideas, but in typical Unferth fashion, it's delivered with heart, a careful slyness, and enough style to help you digest the most difficult realities of our lifetime." --Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books
"Dazzling . . . enthralling . . . defiant." --Michelle Schingler, Foreword Reviews , starred review
"Unferth's prose is distinctive--at times whimsical and at times fantastical. . . . At the story's core, Unferth locates a stubborn, almost absurd persistence of life and love under austere conditions that would render both improbable. In a world preoccupied with preserving life, Earth 7 quietly asks what, exactly, is being preserved and what, if anything, is worth carrying forward." --Bing Lin, Science
"Earth 7 is an epic sci-fi masterpiece and a love letter to the totally lush, and shockingly diverse, life-forms of our planet. I adore this book. Everyone who lives on planet Earth should read it." --Rita Bullwinkel

" Earth 7 is an elegy to the world we have now, already disappearing, and at the same time, it's a message in a bottle, an offering of hope for some far-off future. Intimate and wistful and hypnotic, full of rich detail and beautiful writing." --Charles Yu

"Is it a love story? A dystopian novel oddly suffused with brightness, tenderness, and philosophy? Is it sci-fi or realism? It's all of these things, and it's like no other book you've ever read, by a writer like no other." --Elizabeth McCracken

"Deb Olin Unferth is one of my favorite writers, and Earth 7 confirms her talent for being one of the best storytellers working today. It is a brilliant feast of wisdom and imagination, virtuosic and urgent, full of humor and love. Don't miss this beautiful, strange novel!" --Brandon Hobson

"I'm a Deb Olin Unferth stan forever--she is the master of the exacting and luminous. Earth 7 is the friend you want after the end of the world. It will reinvigorate your love for our planet." --Marie-Helene Bertino

"An electric, hilarious, and harrowing story of fractured technological identities and interdimensional exile in a shattered future. With her signature absurd genius, Deb Olin Unferth has created a shocking and moving speculation that I suspect breaks new ground in climate fiction." --Jessica Anthony

"With humor and unmatched imagination, Deb Olin Unferth writes about humanity in all its facets--our destructiveness and our failures, but our capacity for love, too (however imperfect). Exhilarating and original." --Rachel Khong

"What a remarkable book! Having recently tried and failed to write about climate change in Earth's far future myself, I know how hard a task Unferth has set for herself. Yet her story enfolds the reader like a dream--so much beauty, so much wisdom, such feats of imagination. I am in awe." --Karen Joy Fowler

" Earth 7 has knocked me out of kilter in all sorts of strange and haunting and wonderful ways. A work of desperate and loving imagination that follows its own impulsive logic and treads where most of us fear to go. Terrifying and life-affirming all at the same dizzying time. Throw yourself into Deb Olin Unferth's world; you won't regret it." --Jon McGregor

" Earth 7 begins where most love stories would give up: with the world already gone. In the tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin, Unferth uses the machinery of speculative fiction to ask the oldest questions. . . . A heart-cracking, mind-expanding, and exhilarating novel." --Jonathan Miles, author of Eradication



Publisher Marketing:

An end-of-the-world love story, an epic full of pathos and humor, asking what can be saved of our planet

Well, that's about it for the story of planet Earth, poor Earth, reduced to not much more than a piece of burnt coal. But, as Deb Olin Unferth shows in her latest electrifying novel, life and love persist, even in the most unexpected, inhospitable places.

Two women meet on a beach of artificial sand. One was raised in a pod in the ocean and the other may or may not be a robot. Their love--or any love--seems so unlikely. Earth is severely depopulated. Some people have given up, gone off to Mars. Others pursue eternal life as digital code. And yet others, like Dylan and Melanie, are holdouts--and some of those holdouts are constructing a vast molecular collection in hopes that a future person may be alive to make a new Earth. Foolhardy? Misguided? Quixotic? Probably. But what can a human (or a robot) do?

By the end of Unferth's wild, poetic, revelatory, and slyly philosophical novel, the reader has traveled to the very edges of the cosmos as a "soul globule" and between grains of sand as a microscopic tardigrade. A slim book tackling big questions (is all matter conscious? will we tech ourselves into salvation, or out of existence?), Earth 7 is a poignant inquiry into death, mourning, and indefatigable life, the most exhilarating work to date by one of our most original and beloved writers.



Review Citations:

  • Booklist 03/01/2026 (EAN 9781644453940, Hardcover) - *Starred Review
  • Publishers Weekly 03/30/2026 (EAN 9781644453940, Hardcover) - *Starred Review
  • Kirkus Reviews 04/01/2026 (EAN 9781644453940, Hardcover) - *Starred Review
  • Foreword 04/27/2026 (EAN 9781644453940, Hardcover)

Contributor Bio:Unferth, Deb Olin

Deb Olin Unferth is the author of six books, including Barn 8 and Wait Till You See Me Dance. She has received a Guggenheim
Fellowship and three Pushcart Prizes, and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her work has appeared in Granta, Harper's, McSweeney's, and The Paris Review.