Hardcover, 302 pages
English language
Published April 7, 2013 by Simon & Schuster.
When an extraterrestrial arrives on Earth, his first impressions of humans are less than positive. Taking the form of Professor Andrew Martin at Cambridge University, the visitor is eager to complete his task and hurry back to his own utopian planet. Disgusted by the way humans look, what they eat, their capacity for murder and war, he is equally baffled by the concepts of love and family. But as time goes on, he starts to reconsider.
It's not a long book but I found this a real endurance test. Especially when Haig gets to the end and realises he's got a few more pages to fill so he just writes a bulleted list of like forty items of pat philosophy.
I rarely give a book a full five stars but this one definitely deserves it. I took much longer than usual to read this one, partly because most chapters are super short and I could pick up/put down this book waiting for this or that. On the surface this book is a science fiction story about an alien inhabiting a human and it's observations of our species. It is also much much more than that. A book that will have you laughing, any crying, and sighing, and thinking, and maybe making the reader a little more human in the process.
