LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION

"Like parenthood itself, The Need is frightening and maddening and full of dark comedy...Phillips, as careful with language as she is bold with structure, captures many small sharp truths. She is very good on drudgery and tiredness and marital resentment... With forensic precision Phillips identifies the price a parent will pay for tuning out just for a second, because that will certainly be the second when someone rolls off the bed or gets a finger trapped in the door...Everyday life, here, is both tedious and fascinating, grotesque and lovely, familiar and tremendously strange." --NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (EDITORS' CHOICE)

"Brilliant...It's not hard to see why high-wattage contemporaries like Lauren Groff and Emily St. John Mandel have lavished praise...a sort of narrative nesting doll, a story infused with both essential home truths and a wild, almost unhinged sense of unreality....What Helen Phillips (The Beautiful Bureaucrat) builds from the first paragraphs is too clever, and moves too quickly, to be easily ground down in a review. Even the vaguely unfinished ending, less a full stop than a sort of pregnant pause, feels somehow right; a fitting coda to her spare, eerie marvel of novel, both beautifully familiar and profoundly strange. (A-)"--ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

"If the challenges of parenting young children have ever driven you to the brink, you'll recognize what's happening to Molly Nye--for about 10 pages. This fever dream of a novel starts like a thriller (someone's in the living room), morphs into speculative sci-fi (the intruder is from a separate universe) and ends up like nothing you've ever read before. In a good way."--PEOPLE

"Molly's struggle to remain her full self while giving so much of herself away is electrifying...Mothers will recognize so much in this fresh novel -- but they aren't the only ones who should read it. Phillips has found a way to make these experiences universal, acknowledging the importance of the other -- the creature without whom none of us would exist."--WASHINGTON POST

"A taut thriller...Between chills, readers will notice the pleasures of Phillips's prose. Her style combines the sensibility of a poet with the forward drive of a thriller...Phillips's crystalline style vividly evokes her characters. She draws them so precisely that before we know it, we're deep inside their lives...[A] bewitching, fiercely original novel."--BOSTON GLOBE

"Hyponotically eerie...An ode to motherhood and a nightmarish rendering of its 'pleasures' and pains...Phillips structures her astonishing fifth book in edge-of-your-seat mini-chapters that infuse domesticity with a horror-movie level of foreboding, reminding us that the maternal instinct is indeed a primal one." --LEIGH HABER, O MAGAZINE

"The Need is a taut, thrilling rendering of motherhood at its most psychologically terrifying."--VANITY FAIR

--Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times-bestselling author of Hummingbird Salamander

--Ramona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal

"[A] striking new work of dystopian fiction... Textured, intimate, and taut with dread, Phillips's latest is a well-crafted machine with a throbbing pulse." --Vogue

"A familiar yet distorted world in which a desperate family clings to rare moments of joy." --PEOPLE, 'Book of the Week'

"A tense dystopian thriller set in a near-future where sophisticated artificial intelligence threatens human existence as we know it." --TIME, "25 New Books You Need to Read This Summer"

"Phillips' skills as a stylist and keen observer of human nature keep us feverishly turning pages. And her unexpected humor lightens the mood." --Los Angeles Times

"[An] eerie but fundamentally warmhearted novel." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"The fearsome power of Phillips's imagination always dazzles, but in this prescient novel, it's the tender portrait of love and care in an uncertain world that leaves a lasting mark." --Esquire, The Best Books of Summer 2024

"This chilling vision of a near future, one where its dwellers 'can't avoid the void, ' resonates unnervingly with the way things already are. Readers won't be able to look away." --Publisher's Weekly

"With propulsive intensity and extraordinary finesse and insight, Phillips keenly dramatizes the love and terror of parenthood in a poisoned, high-tech, yet not utterly hopeless world." --Booklist

"The world of Hum feels not too far from our present day reality. [Hum] makes you, the reader, deeply uncomfortable (in a good way) about the advances in AI and our dependence on technology." --Town & Country, "The 39 Must-Read Books of Summer 2024"

"The true wonder of Hum lies in its chilling reflection of our present times. However, Phillips cuts through the bleakness of the fictitious world she has created by transporting readers deep inside May's psyche, the tumultuous beating heart of the novel, to witness the tender humanity no amount of technological advancement can destroy... an intriguing novel about motherhood set in a technologically advanced future." --Shelf Awareness

"Phillips' new novel again shows her talent for finding warmth, humanity, and connection within an all-too-conceivable dystopian landscape... Writing with precision, insight, sensitivity, and compassion, Phillips renders the way love and family bonds--between partners, parents and children, and siblings--can act as a balm and an anchor amid the buffeting winds of a fast-changing, out-of-control world. A perceptive page-turner." --Kirkus (starred)

"A dystopian, futuristic hellscape just around the corner, Hum digs into our tenderest wounds... Infuriating and enthralling, Hum rushes along with an undercurrent of panic about our own not-too-distant future." --Electric Lit, The Best Books of the Summer, According to Indie Booksellers

"Unsettling... Hum effectively shows us that no one (bar the exceedingly rich) will be protected from the effects of climate change or a deregulated AI revolution." --Locus Magazine

"A humanistic novel about love and parenthood in the near-future." --CyberNews