From Powells.com
Our booksellers' favorite books of the year!
Hot new releases and under-the-radar gems for adults and kids.
Staff Pick
Rebekah Bergman’s astounding debut, The Museum of Human History, breaks open questions of what you’re willing to accept in order to preserve what you might, eventually, lose; how to live in the face of dying and how to die in the face of living; what it means to be awake, and what that wakefulness requires; storytelling as an act of conservation; and the slippery connection between an imagined future and a distorted past. The Museum of Human History is a novel that aches with grief and humanity and the beauty it’s possible to find in the world, even if you vision has become crowded with loss. Recommended By Kelsey F., Powells.com
I loved The Museum of Human History so much! The book hops through time and follows a collection of characters in a coastal town that's attracted shiny biomedical companies trying to rush anti-aging procedures to market, mostly staying in the decades before and after a twin girl falls into a coma and stops aging. It's a very literary, heartbreaking, speculative page-turner about the tragedy of memory, and the desire to hold onto the best moments in your life, and the ways life stories are written and re-written as we move through time. I can't believe this is Rebekah Bergman's debut (there are so many sentences that made me gasp, and so many that made me cry), and I'm so excited to read everything she writes. Recommended By Michelle C., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
After nearly drowning, eight-year-old Maeve Wilhelm falls into a strange comatose state. As years pass, it becomes clear that Maeve is not physically aging. A wide cast of characters finds themselves pulled toward Maeve, each believing that her mysterious "sleep" holds the answers to their life's most pressing questions: Kevin Marks, a museum owner obsessed with preservation; Monique Gray, a refugee and performance artist; Lionel Wilhelm, an entomologist who dreamed of being an astrophysicist; and Evangeline Wilhelm, Maeve's identical twin. As Maeve remains asleep, the characters grapple with a mysterious new technology and medical advances that promise to ease anxiety and end pain, but instead cause devastating side effects.
Weaving together speculative elements and classic fables, and exploring urgent issues from the opioid epidemic to the hazards of biotech to the obsession with self-improvement and remaining forever young, Rebekah Bergman's The Museum of Human History is a brilliant and fascinating novel about how time shapes us, asking what — if anything — we would be without it.
Review
“[A] satisfying speculative debut.” Publishers Weekly
Review
“In The Museum of Human History, Rebekah Bergman offers readers what we as individuals can rarely see on our own: the interconnectedness that hums between every human being, the high cost of painlessness and hard truths of our inevitable obsolesce. This is a novel about what we want and also what we can't escape — a story as heartbreaking as it is seductive.” Allegra Hyde, author of Eleutheria
Review
“There are no static exhibits or neatly segmented timelines in Bergman's The Museum of Human History. Here, lives bleed into each other, echoing on decades, centuries, millennia after they end (if they end). A haunting chord of a novel that will hang in the air long after you turn the final page.” Tiffany Tsao, author of The Majesties
About the Author
Rebekah Bergman's fiction has been published in Joyland, Tin House, The Masters Review anthology, and other journals. She lives in Rhode Island with her family.