The Humans by Matt Haig

Received for review

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd (9 May 2013)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0857868756
• It's hardest to belong when you're closest to home...One wet Friday evening, Professor Andrew Martin of Cambridge University solves the world's greatest mathematical riddle. Then he disappears. When he is found walking naked along the motorway, Professor Martin seems different. Besides the lack of clothes, he now finds normal life pointless. His loving wife and teenage son seem repulsive to him. In fact, he hates everyone on the planet. Everyone, that is, except Newton. And he's a dog. Can a bit of Debussy and Emily Dickinson keep him from murder? Can the species which invented cheap white wine and peanut butter sandwiches be all that bad? And what is the warm feeling he gets when he looks into his wife's eyes?
• Cover: Love this cover.  In person it's really vivid.
• The concept immediately intrigued me- that our narrator would be an alien taking over the life of a maths professor that has solved a maths problem that the world is not ready for the ramifications.  His mission- remove all evidence it was ever solved.  Including his wife and son.
• His observations on human behaviour were hilarious.  Him finding us absurd...but he gradually comes to envy us and want to join us through discovering beautiful pieces of music and poetry, particularly that of Emily Dickinson.  As well as learning to love Isobel- the professor's wife and his son, Gulliver. 
• At first, even though I was enjoying it, I found it slow going, but about one hundred pages in it really picked up and I flew through it.
• This is a witty, quirky, heart-warming, must-read book that will make you look at our existence in a totally new light.
• 4.5/5 stars.