Archive Beneath

About this book

Archive Beneath is a bright, awed, deeply humane first contact novel in which the visitors are not from the sky. Dr Saga Eiriksdottir, forty three, is a conservation biologist working out of a field station in the Icelandic highlands, and she keeps two notebooks. The first is her work: population counts, nesting surveys, the slow patient arithmetic of species going down. The second she has never shown anyone, because it is a list of ninety four unexplained daylight sightings, and the only reason she started it is that she noticed, six years ago, that a sighting she had dismissed had happened four days before the last confirmed pair of a small ground nesting bird disappeared from a valley she had been surveying for a decade. When she checked, the pattern was already there in the literature, hiding in plain sight, because nobody had ever thought to plot unexplained sightings against extinction dates.