Terrestrial History

A Novel

By: Joe Mungo Reed

Narrated by: Dave Gillies, Lianne Walker

Hannah is a fusion scientist working alone at a remote cottage off the coast of Scotland when she sees a figure making his way from the sea. It is a young man from a human settlement on Mars, traveling backwards through time to try to make a crucial intervention in the fate of our dying planet, and he needs Hannah's help. Hannah and the stranger are on the path towards a breakthrough—and then things go terribly wrong.

Roban lives in the Colony, one of the first generation born to this sterile new outpost, where he is consumed by longing for the lost wonders of a home planet he never knew. Between Hannah and Roban, two generations, a father and a daughter, face an uncertain future in a world that is falling apart. Andrew is a politician running to be Scotland's First Minister. For his starkly rationalist daughter Kenzie, this idealism doesn't offer the hard tools needed to keep the rising floods at bay. And so, she signs on to work for a company that would abandon Earth for the promise of a world beyond—in contravention of all Andrew stands for.

In considering which concerns should guide us in a time of crisis—social, technological, or familial—and reckoning with the question of whether there is meaning to be found in the pursuit of salvation beyond success itself, Joe Mungo Reed has written a novel of elegiac wonder and beauty.

©2025 Joe Mungo Reed (P)2025 Tantor Media

Loved the concept, the charaters, and the evocative writing.

Only 4 stars because I was so disappointed at the ending. I really want to know what happened!

Good book, but not for Audio

I like the story and the characters, particularly the chapters about trying to develop fusion. The audio format did not work well for me. Each chapter takes place from a different narrator's POV in a different time period, so it can be hard to have to reorient at the start of each new chapter. There are 2 readers, one male and one female. The male reader has a thicker accent. I found him hard to understand at times and didn't like his reading cadence.