Nine days of bright weather

An asteroid is coming. The world has four years. This is the story of what we did with them.

In May 2034, an astronomer on a mountain in New South Wales flags a faint moving smudge and writes four words in her observing log: worth a second night. Eleven days later the impact probability reaches one.

The object is called Sorrel. It is one point two kilometres across. It will strike the eastern Atlantic in fifty months and it will kill a hundred and forty million people.

What follows is the largest thing the human species has ever attempted. Four hundred thousand people across thirty-one countries. Welders in Sheffield holding tolerances nobody asked for. A Kenyan lawyer rewriting the law of outer space in eleven weeks. A washed-up cosmonaut who has not flown in six years and has nothing left to lose. And in a Staffordshire village, a publican who keeps her pub open through all of it, because that is what a pub is for.

They have one shot, one bomb, and a nineteen-minute delay between every question and every answer.

It works.

Nine Days of Bright Weather is the story of the eleven years that followed — the best years the species ever had — and of the thing nobody was looking at, in the one direction no telescope on Earth can see.

An epic, documentary-style apocalyptic novel told through the people who built the machine: the flight director, the weapons engineer, the journalist, the postdoc, the grandmother behind the bar. For readers of Seveneves, Station Eleven, The Martian and On the Beach.

A note before you begin: this is not a story about survival. It is a story about what human beings are actually like when the sky is falling, and the answer it arrives at is not the one anybody expected — including the people who lived it. If you want to be lied to, this is the wrong book. If you want to know what we would really do, it is the only one.

101,000 words. A complete standalone novel.

📖 496 pages