October 2026
Under Story
By Chloe Benjamin
What If? is a storyteller’s narrative credo, the creative engine that fires up the most captivating stories. The What Ifs that author Chloe Benjamin poses in her audacious new novel UNDER STORY are wildly inventive, but to name them would be to spoil many of the beautiful surprises in this epic adventure through time and space. Suffice it to say, this book follows a mushroom scientist named Laurel Salter who, after a terrible personal tragedy and a failed marriage, takes emotional refuge working as a dishwasher at the McMurdo research base in the icy wilderness of Antartica. Her retreat from the world is interrupted by the arrival of her ex-husband Eli Rosen, a physicist who’s come to study a “highly unusual visual phenomenon” that’s appeared at McMurdo, a natural anomaly that may present Laurel—and Eli—with the opportunity of traveling through the past to address what went wrong. A book about the magical possibilities alive in nature, the complex demands of love and marriage, and the power of acceptance, UNDER STORY goes to places other books have never dared to go. This one’s a mind-bender with a huge heart.
READ IF YOU LIKE: Madeleine L’Engle’s A WRINKLE IN TIME, Charlotte McConaghy’s WILD DARK SHORE, Christopher Nolan’s INCEPTION