I picked Under Story by Chloe Benjamin up just a few days after it is officially published, and I’m so glad I did. It means I get to be one of the early voices yelling about it on the internet. Consider this my attempt to talk you into reading it.
The opening chapter is a small exchange about roots, like where they go and what they do down there. The answer goes like this:
“Some go deep down. Others grow as wide as the branches.”
I knew right then this book had the high potential to wreck me, in a good way.
Yes, absolutely, it did.
What the Book Is About
Laurel Salter is a brilliant mycologist who walks away from the life she built to wash dishes in Antarctica. There’s something so specific about a person with an extraordinary mind choosing the most ordinary, repetitive work possible, at the literal bottom of the planet, an existential crisis. That premise alone had me flipping pages faster because I was curious what happened and what would happen.
While she’s there, she meets Eli, and he’s no stranger. for her Eli is someone who has mattered to her for most of her life. Imagine going to one of the most remote corners of the world and running into exactly the one that mean so much to us. If that isn’t fate, I don’t know what is.
Eli wanted to be an astronaut once. Years earlier, he floated an idea to her: the possibility of a duoverse instead of a universe.
“That’s because heat—like time—only moves in one direction. A cold plate will never get hotter, microwaves and ovens notwithstanding. And we wake up to tomorrow, never yesterday.”
Under Story, Chloe Benjamin
“The problem is that physicists like symmetry. Mainly we like it because the universe seems to like it, too” “But if the universe likes symmetry,” she said, spooning paella onto her plate, “then why doesn’t time move in both directions?”
“We don’t know,” he continued. “There are lots of interesting theories. Maybe time does move in two directions, but the human mind can only perceive one of them. On the other hand, the closer you look at the universe, the more asymmetry you see.”
Then life happened.
(This is the part where I admit I’m a mess at reviewing fiction, because I never know how much to tell you. So I’ll say this and stop: by the time we reach a certain point in the story, Eli’s belief in the idea has faded, while Laurel’s has grown into something she can’t ignore. The two of them end up chasing that possibility down together. Go find out the rest yourself. It’s worth it.)
“The asymmetry got me thinking. What if we don’t live in a universe? What if we live in a Duoverse?”
Under Story, Chloe Benjamin
My Brain and My Heart Were Both Working Overtime
If I could draw what my emotional state looked like while reading this, it would be one of those looping mind-blown GIFs 🤯. Every aspect of this book was doing something to me.
The narrative is threaded through with questions about being alive that wake up the philosophical part of your brain. How people grow. How we tend to overlook things. How we carry our destiny and life around afterward. And there’s this nudge running underneath it all to sit with opportunity and regret at the same time.
Then my geek side got fed too. Consciousness. Physics. Fungi. That last one sent me straight back to Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, one of the best nonfiction books I’ve ever read on the subject. If you loved that book, the mycology thread here will feel like coming home.
The Balance Is Ridiculous
Every element of Under Story holds its own weight. The sci-fi concept is fascinating without drowning the story. Each character is a whole person with their own gravity and their own spectrum of traits. Laurel gets her own arc, Eli gets his own arc, and then there’s the relationship between them, one that moves and shifts and complicates itself in ways that felt painfully real, just like life should be. The science rotates alongside all of it.
Getting one of those right is hard. Getting all of them right, in one story, at the same time? That takes serious craft and deserve a standing applause.
Under Story is a book of more than 500 pages, and I finished it in under 12 hours. I couldn’t put it down, didn’t want to put it down. That should tell you more than enough about what I think about the book.
Easy 5/5. Book of the month (still early September but I know this book deserves it). And I’m calling it now: this belong on my books of the year list.
My Favorite Bits
- “Sometimes I think we’re all under the same mass delusion. (..) So why are we going to work and having kids and reading magazines like the world as we know it isn’t ending?”
“Little pleasures keep us going, though.”
- As an adult, she thought of its twin elements—romance, difficulty—and wondered if the former required the latter, or if the latter acquired the former in hindsight.
- Every year, Laurel felt wretchedly tender. In the long run, though, something hardened. She became adamant in her belief that humans were no different from the rest of the animal kingdom.
- Those who questioned her underestimated her determination.
- We should not presume that any living organism is driven by motives more noble than the urge to keep living.
- “It is classic human error,” Gloria said, “to disregard what we cannot see. But the continuation of life on this planet, just like its beginning, depends on relationships. No organism can function—or be understood—alone. Everywhere, life tangles.”
- “But it’s asymmetrical,” said Laurel. “Unless we aren’t seeing the full picture.”
- “Entanglement happens when two particles become connected,” he said. “You can do it in a lab: scientists entangle two photons, for example, and then separate them. After that, the photons influence each other. It’s like they lose their independence.”
- “Nothing matters if we always have control. Nothing matters if life never runs out. So it’s not true that nothing matters,” she said. “Everything does”
Author: Chloe Benjamin
Number of pages: 512 pages
Publication date: 1 September 2026
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