Nothing on Earth

“I often traveled for work.” So begins Nothing on Earth, a propulsive novel that tells the story of Anna Hendrix, an American spy, as she seeks to learn the nature of an unknown, potentially powerful material that appears at seemingly random points around the world and that science can’t explain. No one knows what it is; everyone wants to find it. For a long time, Anna worked in counterterrorism, but her new mission is something different, a mystery that sets allies and enemies scrambling across the globe to find answers. Her pursuit takes her from the Horn of Africa to Southeast Asia, through expatriate enclaves that play host to a wide cast of characters: aid workers, diplomats, foreign correspondents, energy magnates, insurgents, dissidents, and, inevitably, other spies. As the pressure mounts to find the source of the material, Anna must make choices with life-changing implications not just for herself, but for the people with whom she deals, even as her search takes her far from the young daughter waiting back home. In Nothing on Earth, Ian MacKenzie reimagines a pivotal decade in the Pax Americana, from the killing of Osama bin Laden to the storming of the Capitol. Anna’s voice—lean, understated, unflappable—is our companion and guide through the dark topography of geopolitical power and, in the end, the outer limits of human comprehension. For fans of Rachel Cusk and John le Carré alike, this is a story of power and secrecy, geopolitics and science, parenthood and loss, and the question of how we know what we think we know, how we make sense of our existence on Earth.