The Humans

Product Information

Haig’s unexpectedly raw tale of love, belonging, and peanut butter… It’s funny, clever and quite, quite lovely. A moving, funny and joyous exploration of how to live better, love better and feel more alive, Reasons to Stay Alive is more than a memoir.

The Humans by Matt Haig | Waterstones

What Cave cannot acknowledge in his emotions, he must suppress, and in a double conceit, the ghost of his dead son overtakes him even as he tries to possess the life of his increasingly errant daughter, the ‘wonderfully ambivalent’ Bryony. That is why so much that is beautiful on this planet has to do with time passing and the Earth turning.Matt Haig books consist of both fiction and non fiction, and he has written for children as well as adults. The Humans is structured as a scientific analysis of life on Earth, but it is also about the personal experiences of an extraterrestrial who struggles to reconcile the paradox of human life. As our alien's emotional attachment grows, so too do his reflections on the odd appeal of our short and brutish lives, and especially on our gift for love. Disguised as Martin, he drinks wine, reads poetry, develops an ear for rock music, and a taste for peanut butter. Philip’s artlessness enables him tell the truth more poignantly: ‘Dads are just men who have babies but I know he loved me because I felt it go out of me … It was like air or blood or bones or something that made me me and it wasn't there any more and I had only half of it now and I didn't know if that was enough.

Humans: An A to Z by Matt Haig | Goodreads Humans: An A to Z by Matt Haig | Goodreads

We humans do weird things all the time without thinking about it, and it’s books like this one that make you realise that and make you stop to wonder why.They have developed technology at a rate too fast for human psychology to keep up with, and yet they still pursue advancement for advancement's sake, and for the pursuit of money and fame they all crave so much. The 97 point list that features in the book is perhaps the book's shining moment, Matt's skillful blending of the emotional with the humorous means he avoids this list becoming saccharine and it is genuinely moving, my favourite point being "It's not the length of life that matters. This alien came with the basic knowledge that “humans are an arrogant species defined by violence and greed.