How High We Go in the Dark

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu is a literary science fiction and fantasy novel published on 18 January 2022 by William Morrow, with Bloomsbury acquiring United Kingdom and Commonwealth rights. The novel is told in a series of interlinked stories set after a pandemic reshapes life on earth, and it focuses on grief and its intersection with technology.

The virus is called the Arctic Plague and reaches San Francisco on 4 July 2031. Its prevalence is such that a funerary cryptocurrency becomes common currency and the funeral industry becomes dominant, overtaking banking. The book's later sections move further forward, and humanity recovers extraterrestrial material in the 2020s, which is how the novel widens from a pandemic narrative into one about the species as a whole.

The cast is deliberately dispersed. Among those whose stories are told are a comedian working at a theme park for terminally ill children who falls in love with a mother trying to keep her son alive, a scientist who failed to save his own son and gets a second chance when one of his test animals develops human speech, and a man who plans a party for neighbours who woke from comas to find their families gone.