The American novelist Helen Phillips’s speculative thriller The Need (2019) was longlisted for the National Book Award. The technique of mixing ordinary life with futuristic elements proved so successful that Phillips revisits it in Hum, her unnerving third novel.

Hum follows May Webb, who proved so good at her job improving AI’s communicative abilities that she rendered herself obsolete. Now unemployed, she and her husband, a gig worker, fret over the expense of keeping their young children, Lu and Sy, happy. May decides to sell her face to an adversarial technology start-up, which reconstructs it so she can elude facial-recognition software. The needle that inches disturbingly close to her eye is wielded not by a human but by a machine known as a ‘hum’. When she is paid for her time on the operating table, she splurges the money on an expensive getaway to the Botanical Garden, a green refuge in the barren city. To ensure that the whole family appreciate this escape into nature, she makes them leave their AI devices at home – a decision she will later regret.

This near-future dystopia presses relentlessly upon the present. Hums are ubiquitous, dispensing medication, providing security and bombarding users with aggressive advertisements thinly veiled as helpful advice. Phillips drops into her spare prose headlines plucked from real news about heat waves, vanishing birds, attempts to outlaw the phrase ‘death camps’ and