Earth 7
By Deb Olin Unferth
Graywolf, June 9, 2026
An end-of-the-world love story, an epic full of pathos and humor, asking what can be saved of our planet
Well, that’s about it for the story of planet Earth, poor Earth, reduced to not much more than a piece of burnt coal. But, as Deb Olin Unferth shows in her latest electrifying novel, life and love persist, even in the most unexpected, inhospitable places.
Two women meet on a beach of artificial sand. One was raised in a pod in the ocean and the other may or may not be a robot. Their love—or any love—seems so unlikely. Earth is severely depopulated. Some people have given up, gone off to Mars. Others pursue eternal life as digital code. And yet others, like Dylan and Melanie, are holdouts—and some of those holdouts are constructing a vast molecular collection in hopes that a future person may be alive to make a new Earth. Foolhardy? Misguided? Quixotic? Probably. But what can a human (or a robot) do?
By the end of Unferth’s wild, poetic, revelatory, and slyly philosophical novel, the reader has traveled to the very edges of the cosmos as a “soul globule” and between grains of sand as a microscopic tardigrade. A slim book tackling big questions (is all matter conscious? will we tech ourselves into salvation, or out of existence?), Earth 7 is a poignant inquiry into death, mourning, and indefatigable life, the most exhilarating work to date by one of our most original and beloved writers.
Selected Praise
“Earth 7 is an epic sci-fi masterpiece that takes the possibilities of sentience to their end-limit. It’s a moving and suspenseful love story between two very different people, but it’s also a love letter to the totally lush, and shockingly diverse, life-forms of our planet. The breadth and scope and granular texture of this book make it an insane literary sleight of hand. Earth 7 is, in many ways, peerless, but at certain moments it brought to mind Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, but with even more feeling, humor, and sex. I adore this book. There is a whole universe inside it. Everyone who lives on planet Earth should read it.” —Rita Bullwinkel, author of Headshot
“Deb Olin Unferth is one of my favorite writers, and Earth 7 confirms her [as] one of the best storytellers working today. It is a brilliant feast of wisdom and imagination, virtuosic and urgent, full of humor and love. Once I finished the book, I wanted to go back and reread it again. Don’t miss this beautiful, strange novel!”
—Brandon Hobson, author of The Devil is a Southpaw
“In Earth 7, Deb Olin Unferth has delivered an electric, hilarious, and harrowing story of fractured technological identities and interdimensional exile in a shattered future. With her signature absurd genius, Unferth has created a shocking and moving speculation that I suspect breaks new ground in climate fiction. This kaleidoscopic cli-fi begs us to ask: when Earth goes, where goes all the love?”
—Jessica Anthony, author of The Most
“Earth 7 is an unexpectedly rollicking and heartbreaking post-apocalyptic coming-of-age tale meets love story unlike any other. With humor and unmatched imagination, Deb Olin Unferth writes about humanity in all its facets–our destructiveness and our failures, but our capacity for love, too (however imperfect). Exhilarating and original. I will never look at sand the same way.”
—Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans
“To read Deb Olin Unferth is to marvel at every page, how did she do that? The tender, funny characters at the heart of Earth 7 fly on solar kites, travel into grains of sand, and descend to pods at the bottom of the sea to create an epic journey. I’m a Deb Olin Unferth stan forever–she is the master of the exacting and luminous. Earth 7 is the friend you want after the end of the world. It will reinvigorate your love for our planet.” —Marie-Helene Bertino, author of Beautyland
“There is no false hope about the end of the world as we know it in the extraordinary Earth 7, but there is humor and light, depth and brilliance and beauty and strangeness. Is it a love story? A dystopian novel oddly suffused with brightness, tenderness, and philosophy? A virtuoso book that says that in order to save the world, we must do–what? Is it sci-fi or realism? It’s all of these things, and it’s like no other book you’ve ever read, by a writer like no other. How are we to save the world? We must do what we can even if it’s not enough–that, this astonishing book says, is a way and a reason to hope.”
–Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Hero of This Book
About the Author
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of six books, including the novels Barn 8 and Vacation, the story collection Wait Till You See Me Dance, and the memoir Revolution, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her next novel, Earth 7, is forthcoming in 2026. Her work appears in Harper’s, the Paris Review, Granta, and the New York Times Magazine. A recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a professor at the University of Texas in Austin, she teaches for the Michener Center for Writers and the New Writers’ Project.
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