A bleak story of three survivors in the aftermath of a terrible worldwide pandemic that has decimated the population. The writing had elements of great beauty but I disliked the character of Harry, the artist and much of the narrative was tedious. Even on a long road trip, the story could have picked up pace. A decent read for fans of dystopian fiction.

It is a little difficult to say this is an enjoyable read as it is so bleak and close to the current issues affecting us all in one way or another, but it certainly is thought provoking and skillfully written.

Often books written in 2 timelines can become confused, or confusing but the author skillfully marries the two together until they merge towards the end.

If a post-apocalyptic, dystopian global pandemic saga is your thing right now, then this one is worth a read.

An author I will follow.

This was a story of two halves. One half is a relatively peaceful end of the world tale about an isolated man and his neighbors trying to survive. It was slow and quiet yet realistic and engaging. Sprinkled in between we have snippets of conversation between what seems to be two people in a base developing AI tech.
The completely different tones could be quite jarring and you are left wondering what on earth is happening and how the two storylines are ever going to merge if they are at all.

Overall I really enjoyed this read, it could be a tad slow with not a great deal of intrigue to keep you invested, and the different points of view could give you whiplash however reflecting back at the story as a whole I really enjoyed it.

Fans of Station Eleven, this one’s for you: the best dystopian novel I’ve read since Mandel’s. Aristide started writing this in 2017, and unknowingly predicted a much worse pandemic than Covid-19. In July 2020, Harry, a middle-aged painter inhabiting his late nephew’s apartment in London, finally twigs that something major is going on. He packs his car and heads to his Devon cottage, leaving its address under the door of the cute neighbour he sometimes flirts with. Hot days stack up and his new habits of rationing food and soap are deeply ingrained by the time the gal from #22, Ash – along with her sister, Jessie, a doctor who stocked up on medicine before fleeing her hospital – turn up. They quickly sink into his routines but have a bigger game plan: getting to Uganda, where their mum once worked and where they know they will be out of range of Europe’s at-risk nuclear reactors. An epic road trip ensues.

It gradually becomes clear that Harry, Ash and Jessie are among mere thousands of survivors worldwide, somehow immune to a novel disease that spread like wildfire. There are echoes of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in the way that they ransack the homes of the dead for supplies, and yet there’s lightness to their journey. Jessie has a sharp sense of humour, provoking much banter, and the places they pass through in France and Italy are gorgeous despite the circumstances. It would be a privilege to wander empty tourist destinations were it not for fear of nuclear winter and not finding sufficient food – and petrol to keep “the Lioness” (the replacement car they steal; it becomes their refuge) going. While the vague sexual tension between Harry and Ash persists, all three bonds are intriguing.

In an alternating storyline starting in 2017, Lisa and Paul, two computer scientists based in a lab at the Arctic Circle, are programming an AI, Talos XI. Based on reams of data on history and human nature, Talos is asked to predict what will happen next. But when it comes to questions like the purpose of art and whether humans are worth saving, the conclusions he comes to aren’t the ones his creators were hoping for. These sections are set out as transcripts of dialogues, and provide a change of pace and perspective. Initially, I was less sure about this strand, worrying that it would resort to that well-worn trope of machines gone bad. Luckily, Aristide avoids sci-fi clichés, and presents a believable vision of life after the collapse of civilization.

The novel is full of memorable lines (“This absurd overkill, this baroque wedding cake of an apocalypse: plague and then nuclear meltdowns”) and scenes, from Harry burying a dead cow to the trio acting out a dinner party – just in case it’s their last. There’s an environmentalist message here, but it’s subtly conveyed via a propulsive cautionary tale that also reminded me of work by Louisa Hall and Maja Lunde.

I was expecting this book to be uncomfortable and chilling and it lived up to expectation. Perhaps because of the pandemic in which I read it, I'm not sure it was exactly what I was looking for, but the writing is exemplary and the atmosphere tense.

I was unable to finish this book, I found it extremely slow to start. After the first 2 chapters I gave up, I really found it tedious. I didn't like the way the author wrote, it did not feel fluid and I found myself disliking the main character in the first chapter because there was nothing to tell me anything about him except that he was an artist and that some unknown nephew had died and left him his apartment. He came across as creepy and unlikeable.
Into the second chapter and I found myself reading stilted prose in the form of paragraphs with no explanation, possibly "conversations" between two other people and an AI unit (I only assumed this as that was in the description of the book, but otherwise I would not have know who was saying what to who). This was totally unrelated to anything in the first chapter, and while I understand that as the plot developed their paths would all cross, it was a disjointed and awkward move from chapter one to chapter two.
I really could not get enthusiastic about the book and gave up before the end of the second chapter. It was a shame because the description on the story really appealed to me initially, but the way it was written spoiled it for me.

This is a thought provoking read for the current time during a pandemic. I reminds us of how lucky we are and how bad things could be. The idea of ai being the future is not far fetched and may be seen as scary. This is a good fictional read that gets you thinking.

Reading Under The Blue (set during, and largely concerning the effects of, a pandemic) during an actual pandemic was a somewhat disconcerting experience. While the pandemic detailed in the book is far more deadly than Covid-19, it was nevertheless easy to relate to some of the experiences the characters faced in navigating a world entirely changed by disease. The author in fact wrote this novel a few years ago, and her afterword reflecting on publishing it during the age of Covid is a worthwhile read on its own.

While I enjoyed the central narrative following Harry, Ash and Jessie across Europe, for me the book really came alive in the exchanges between Talos, an AI, and the scientists programming it. It was here that the novel was able to engage with some fascinating and prescient ideas, and I loved the way the ending brought both strands of the book together.

This was really relevant and topical in light of the pandemic and I loved the thoughtfulness and play with "what if". There are two key threads to the story. The first is the escape for survival of an older artist and two younger sisters. Their plan is to cross Europe into Africa and they begin a mammoth roadtrip, encountering dissolution along the way. The second thread is the development of a super computer, called Talos, with the aim to predict and prevent catastrophic events and illnesses.

I loved the attention to details like the toll of the epidemic, the responses, the repercussions, the implications of a mass annihilation. I found this well thought-out and intelligent. In the first thread, the three core characters felt real and plausible but I would have loved to understand them more. In the second thread, large portions felt like a philosophical debate, with the scientists trying to justify human existence and values which often contradict cold, hard scientific logic. I enjoyed this up to a point, where I began to become impatient to return to the core story of survival and the outcome. I was also left with a lot of questions - why was the heat so enduring? why didn't we know more about the sisters and their motives? Why were these three able to survive against all odds? Overall, the journey outweighed the questions and I devoured this quickly, enjoying the debate and the peek into an alternative future.

Incredibly intelligent, funny at times, chilling at others- this novel charting two narratives, a post apocalyptic pandemic world and the education of AI, this is a great book for anyone into sci fi or pandemic fiction. Finally something even more odd than the world we are living in at the moment! Light moments intermingle with the chilling, a great read that catapults the reader from emotion to emotion.

Firstly, thank you to netgalley and the publisher for an arc of this title in return for an honest review.

Having already reviewed several books based around a pandemic, I must admit, I didn't find this held my interest as there wasn't really anything I hadn't already read. The AI part was an interesting addition but the digital copy had some download issues which made it more challenging to read.

I understand the environmental message behind this story, humanity is destroying itself, and the pandemic we are currently living through is evidence of that. This novel was started before covid but I'm not sure if it has helped or hindered an apocalyptic storyline.

Overall, I didn't really connect or care about any of the characters and I found it a little laborious to read. I'm sure some readers will have a different opinion as it wasn't written particularly badly, it just wasn't for me.

Oana Aristide is Romanian(as myself). It is so rare to see a Romanian author being promoted in the West that I really, really wanted to show my support too. But turns out, Under the Blue didn't work for me, sadly.

The main problem is that I couldn't warm up to the writing style. In such cases, something else(the story, the characters, the ideas transmitted to readers etc) needs to be extraordinary to force me to overlook the writing itself. But it is not the case here. The story is frankly boring, the characters are noting to write home about, and while there were a few instances I enjoyed some dialogues(for example when Jessie and Ash were fighting I was finally feeling excitement, some fire in the platitude of their endless drive), or a few ideas discusses in the interactions between Thalos and Lisa; overall, once again, there's not much substance to impress.

*Many thanks for the opportunity to read this.

Under The Blue is a post-apocalyptic novel told largely from the perspective of Harry, a reclusive artist, who initially misses the worldwide disaster but soon finds himself on a journey accompanied by two sisters seeking refuge overseas.

We travel with Harry, Ash and Jessie as they struggle to survive against environmental factors and other humans, and piece together the events of the last few months.

Eerily, given the recent pandemic, this book was written in 2017 and predicts quite accurately the negative actions of humans to a threat to their survival (hoarding, panicking, fleeing to the countryside, etc). One line that struck me was ‘He is surprised at how quickly the abnormal becomes normal’, which we have definitely seen across 2020/21 to date.

The story deals with some dark and deep issues – pandemic, environmental concerns and the impact of both human actions and inaction. It is such a terrifying concept (the end of the world as we know it) which makes Under The Blue such a page-turner, full of both desperation, tension, mystery and hope, leaving the reader determined to find out what happens next.

The novel also includes conversations between a scientist and her AI, Talos, designed to monitor threats to the World and humanity, as well as to provide potential solutions. I loved this element of the story, seeing Talos grow and develop. What was concerning, was how often I found myself agreeing with his opinions!

Under The Blue is one of the most thought-provoking stories I’ve read in a long time and the ending left me thinking on the key themes and outcomes for the cast of characters for a good while after.

A highly recommended read and would make a great movie!

Interesting to read in the middle of our real worldwide catastrophe but I still found it hard to be as shocked as I probably should have been. I couldn’t quite read the characters and they all ended up blurring into a sort of ageless non-featured person/persons.

This is one wild book, all full of AI and science and post pandemic, questioning is the world dying, ending, falling apart? Two arguments follow through this story, leaving you constantly questioning what state the world is in.

A road trip beneath clear blue skies and a blazing sun: a reclusive artist is forced to abandon his home and follow two young sisters across a post-pandemic Europe in search of a safe place. Is this the end of the world?

This is possibly not the book to read during a pandemic if you are struggling with everything going on at the moment, which is no fault of the author it should just be a warning to those that are. The book is very well written, it has a dystopian feel to it but contains lots of humour and heartwarming parts.

This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you very much to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

3.5/5.

Slightly confusing until you get into the the swing of the story the book takes AI and adds a pandemic and gives up a thoughtful read. Full of what ifs and missed chances the main characters battle normal life when all around them are dying . With lots of introspective thoughts and mind wandering it offers an insight into what could go wrong when AI gets more intelligent than those who are programming it

Under The Blue - Oana Aristide

𝑨 𝒓𝒐𝒂𝒅 𝒕𝒓𝒊𝒑 𝒃𝒆𝒏𝒆𝒂𝒕𝒉 𝒄𝒍𝒆𝒂𝒓 𝒃𝒍𝒖𝒆 𝒔𝒌𝒊𝒆𝒔 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒂 𝒃𝒍𝒂𝒛𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒔𝒖𝒏: 𝒂 𝒓𝒆𝒄𝒍𝒖𝒔𝒊𝒗𝒆 𝒂𝒓𝒕𝒊𝒔𝒕 𝒊𝒔 𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒄𝒆𝒅 𝒕𝒐 𝒂𝒃𝒂𝒏𝒅𝒐𝒏 𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝒉𝒐𝒎𝒆 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒇𝒐𝒍𝒍𝒐𝒘 𝒕𝒘𝒐 𝒚𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒈 𝒔𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒔 𝒂𝒄𝒓𝒐𝒔𝒔 𝒂 𝒑𝒐𝒔𝒕-𝒑𝒂𝒏𝒅𝒆𝒎𝒊𝒄 𝑬𝒖𝒓𝒐𝒑𝒆 𝒊𝒏 𝒔𝒆𝒂𝒓𝒄𝒉 𝒐𝒇 𝒂 𝒔𝒂𝒇𝒆 𝒑𝒍𝒂𝒄𝒆. 𝑰𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒆𝒏𝒅 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒍𝒅?

𝑴𝒆𝒂𝒏𝒘𝒉𝒊𝒍𝒆 𝒕𝒘𝒐 𝒄𝒐𝒎𝒑𝒖𝒕𝒆𝒓 𝒔𝒄𝒊𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒔 𝒉𝒂𝒗𝒆 𝒃𝒆𝒆𝒏 𝒆𝒅𝒖𝒄𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒊𝒓 𝒃𝒂𝒃𝒚 𝒊𝒏 𝒂 𝒓𝒆𝒎𝒐𝒕𝒆 𝒍𝒐𝒄𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏. 𝑻𝒉𝒆𝒊𝒓 𝒃𝒂𝒃𝒚 𝒊𝒔 𝒄𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒆𝒅 𝑻𝒂𝒍𝒐𝒔, 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒉𝒆 𝒊𝒔 𝒂𝒏 𝒂𝒅𝒗𝒂𝒏𝒄𝒆𝒅 𝑨𝑰 𝒑𝒓𝒐𝒈𝒓𝒂𝒎. 𝑬𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚 𝒘𝒆𝒆𝒌 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒚 𝒇𝒆𝒆𝒅 𝒉𝒊𝒎 𝒅𝒂𝒕𝒂, 𝒔𝒕𝒂𝒓𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒃𝒆𝒈𝒊𝒏𝒏𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒐𝒇 𝒘𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒏 𝒉𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚, 𝒆𝒓𝒂 𝒃𝒚 𝒆𝒓𝒂, 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒂𝒔𝒌 𝒉𝒊𝒎 𝒕𝒐 𝒑𝒓𝒆𝒅𝒊𝒄𝒕 𝒘𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒘𝒊𝒍𝒍 𝒉𝒂𝒑𝒑𝒆𝒏 𝒏𝒆𝒙𝒕 𝒕𝒐 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒉𝒖𝒎𝒂𝒏 𝒓𝒂𝒄𝒆. 𝑨𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒂𝒎𝒆 𝒕𝒊𝒎𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒚'𝒓𝒆 𝒊𝒏𝒗𝒐𝒍𝒗𝒆𝒅 𝒊𝒏 𝒂 𝒊𝒏𝒄𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒈𝒍𝒚 𝒇𝒓𝒂𝒖𝒈𝒉𝒕 𝒑𝒉𝒊𝒍𝒐𝒔𝒐𝒑𝒉𝒊𝒄𝒂𝒍 𝒅𝒆𝒃𝒂𝒕𝒆 𝒂𝒃𝒐𝒖𝒕 𝒘𝒉𝒚 𝒉𝒖𝒎𝒂𝒏 𝒍𝒊𝒇𝒆 𝒊𝒔 𝒔𝒂𝒄𝒓𝒆𝒅 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒘𝒉𝒚 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒑𝒖𝒓𝒑𝒐𝒔𝒆 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒘𝒉𝒊𝒄𝒉 𝒉𝒆 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒃𝒖𝒊𝒍𝒕 - 𝒕𝒐 𝒑𝒓𝒆𝒅𝒊𝒄𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒕𝒔 𝒕𝒐 𝒉𝒖𝒎𝒂𝒏 𝒍𝒊𝒇𝒆 𝒕𝒐 𝒉𝒆𝒍𝒑 𝒖𝒔 𝒂𝒗𝒐𝒊𝒅 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒎 - 𝒊𝒔 𝒂 𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒕𝒉𝒘𝒉𝒊𝒍𝒆 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒆𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒄𝒂𝒍 𝒑𝒖𝒓𝒔𝒖𝒊𝒕.

Ever wondered what you would do in a global pandemic that was rapidly wiping out humanity?
I used to wonder what I would do if a tidal wave hit when I was small, I had all sorts of scenarios in my head about surviving..well obviously I would survive!
This book is a humdinger to read during an actual global pandemic during lockdown and does make you feel really quite edgy, especially when you go out for a walk and see no one and the roads are empty.
This is an apocalyptic road trip in essence following Harry, an older man and artist, Ash his young neighbour and Jessie her sister, a doctor as they travel to escape the ticking time bomb of nuclear meltdown in Europe once everything breaks down in the wake of a catastrophic pandemic; I for one did not know this would happen...note to self, escape to Africa at all costs
You can feel and smell the raw destruction described, the smell of death, a bloated cow, what a disease can do to the body and the heat, the relentless heat.
The story moves between this and another strand in the Arctic of a couple working on an AI programme who will be able to predict future pandemics etc and their outcomes.

I love the characters of the road trip thread they feel real and I felt more absorbed into their story, I was less engaged by the AI story in the Arctic, it felt less relevant to me but the threads drew together at the end to explain some aspects of the story more fully and then made more sense to me.
It is a very timely, thought provoking novel encompassing climate change, humanities effect on the planet and that it really doesn’t need us as much as we think.

I (and probably a lot of other people) have been avoiding pandemic-adjacent literature for at least a year now, resulting in many books on my TBR being left unread on my shelves. However, when I picked this up I (for some foolhardy reason) thought I could handle it. I absolutely could not, and that makes being objective about Under the Blue very tricky. I absolutely raced through it, partially motivated by not wanting it to be what I read before bed two nights running. I found the factual "Afterword" to be really chilling.
I loved the contrast between the two central POVs, very rarely feeling annoyed by moving between the two narrative threads.
Like Station Eleven, there's a lot of consideration of the act of living here - both in the midst of catastrophic world-changing events and in "normal times". However, there's also some really interesting thought around morality and ethics, and some evaluation of humankind's role within the universe.
I gave 4 stars rather than 5, as I think outside of the context of the current climate, without the "coincidences" discussed in the Afterword, I wouldn't have been as subjectively bowled over by this as I was.
Nonetheless, we are living in the current climate regardless, and I found Under the Blue to be utterly gripping. I can foresee myself returning to it and thinking about it more in the weeks to come.

I've been lucky enough to read an early copy of this beautiful book. It was a place to escape to (ironic, given the subject matter!) and has stayed with me over subsequent days, like a searing light around the edges of the everyday.