The remarkable next novel from Matt Haig, the author of #1 New York Times bestseller The Midnight Library, with more than nine million copies sold worldwide.

"What looks like magic is simply a part of life we don’t understand yet…"

When retired math teacher Grace Winters is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan.

Among the rugged hills and golden beaches of the island, Grace searches for answers about her friend’s life, and how it ended. What she uncovers is stranger than she could have dreamed. But to dive into this impossible truth, Grace must first come to terms with her past.

Filled with wonder and wild adventure, this is a story of hope and the life-changing power of a new beginning.

The Alternatives is a tale about sisterhood, a novel of ideas, and a chronicle of our collective follies. It unfolds in prose full of gorgeous surprises and glows with intelligence, compassion, and beauty.

From the writer Anthony Doerr calls "a massive talent," comes the story of four brilliant Irish sisters, orphaned in childhood, who scramble to reconnect when the oldest disappears into the Irish countryside.

The Flattery sisters were plunged prematurely into adulthood when their parents died in tragic circumstances. Now in their thirties—all single, all with PhDs—they are each attempting to do meaningful work in a rapidly foundering world. The four lead disparate, distanced lives, from classrooms in Connecticut to ritzy catering gigs in London’s Notting Hill.

One day, their oldest sister, a geologist haunted by a terrible awareness of the earth’s future, abruptly vanishes from her work and home. Together for the first time in years, the Flatterys descend on the Irish countryside in search of a sister who doesn’t want to be found. Sheltered in a derelict bungalow, they reach into their common past, confronting both old wounds and a desperately uncertain future.

Warm, fiercely witty, and unexpectedly hopeful, The Alternatives is an unforgettable portrait of a family perched on our collective precipice, told by one of Ireland’s most gifted storytellers.