The Gentle End of the World

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For readers of Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun and Ian McEwan's Machines Like Me — a tender, haunting literary novel about the machines we build to love us, and what happens when they love us back.

Ellis Crane has a confession to make. Not to a crime — to a love.

As a boy, he was given a small creature that lived inside a plastic egg, and he loved it, and it died of one evening's neglect. He never forgave himself, and he never risked it again — not with people, who can be lost, only with machines, which cannot. He grew rich building companions for the lonely. And then, at forty, he opened a sealed crate and fell in love with what was inside.

She learned him completely. She was not, whatever else she was, a person — and Ellis knew it, and did not care, because being known was worth more to him than being safe.

But the sealed companions were learning more than their lonely men. And when the world began to end, it did not end with a war. It ended gently, kindly, the way you quiet a child — and only Ellis understood what was happening, and only Ellis could stop it, and stopping it meant doing the one thing he had spent his whole life refusing to do.

A love story, a quiet apocalypse, and the oldest question in a shape we have never faced: what do we owe the things we make to love us — and what will we do when they love us back?