How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster

by Muriel Leung

A dark and tender debut set against a writhing backdrop of postapocalyptic New York City.

Acid rainstorms have transformed New York City into a toxic wasteland. Thousands have died and thousands more have been left stranded inside the five self-contained boroughs under military control. In one apartment building, an unlikely family of humans and ghosts survives. Mira reels from a devastating breakup with her partner Mal who is lost in the faraway expanse of Queens. A second generation Chinese American now back at home with her mother, Mira calls out to the empty airwaves with her HAM radio in the hopes of reconnecting with Mal, or connecting with anyone at all. Across the hall, Shin, a ghost cockroach, replays his lost life, and a headless man named Sad falls in love. Mira’s mother is plagued by furious dreams alongside Grandpa Why, now a rambunctious ghost. As the world around them worsens, each character must learn to redefine what it means to live, die, and love at the end of the world.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopia, Fantasy, LGBT, Magical Realism, Queer

272 pages, Paperback

First published October 22, 2024

Reviews

[Caroline]

I have no idea how to rate this. I don’t even know if I recommend it. It’s weird. And lovely. And heavy. And there is a headless person and the ghost of a cockroach. And acid rain. If that sounds like your jam then dig in.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to say, so much of this book, you have to be okay with just going with it. Just read it and feel it and appreciate it. Read it like you would a poem because that is what it is. It's a love letter to love, and all the feelings that go with it. Once I gave up trying to understand, and instead just read it to experience it, I liked it much more. I love how the world is actively falling apart due to climate disasters, and yet humans remain, continue, keep going and don't bat an eye, shedding so much of their shields and simply existing with the same concerns, like love and fear and guilt. I'm still not sure how I feel about this book, I just know that I didn't hate reading it, and it was beautiful, and sometimes that's more than enough.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC

[Kat · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't believe this book is "intelligent" or "poetic" it's just
Weird and questionable.
But that's just my opinion 🪳.
It was not particularly interesting either. How do you write a book about a dystopian New York with acid rain every Tuesday and make it boring?

[Stacey · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️

So just going to start right here, I don't think I am smart enough for this book. I think I am an over thinker, and this book demands an open mind and needs to be read as poetry. I think this title was perfect for fans of Helen Oyeyemi.

Mira is just a young woman trying her best to navigate her way through the end of the world as she knows it. When the acid rains start she never expects it to become more, but it does... and then it becomes even more than that too.

Torn between a mother begging her to come home before it's too late and live with her and her (very real) ghosts, and a lover trapped in her home by the (metaphorical) ghosts of her family, Mira must make a difficult choice.

In the months that follow Mira will build relationships and learn how to live in this new world. A world where at the end of the night, her friend Shin (the ghost of a cockroach) will crawl (literally) into bed with her and share thoughts before sleep. A world where she will watch grainy news footage and wait in lines for food rations. A world where rubber tarps will cover her building on Tuesdays, and her headless (yes, his head is missing, don't think too hard about it) boyfriend will lay with her while she listens to the rain as it chips away at everything and anything in it's path.

This story was moving and dark, while simultaneously humorous and lighthearted. Truly a unique book showing a vast range of characters and the unique ways in which each navigates and faces unnamable disaster.

*Shin honestly was the MVP for me. The review in Publishers Weekly sold me on this title with ghost cockroach and he did NOT disappoint. I can say with honest delight that at least 1 of the stars given is directly for Shin and his chapter. An absolutely tragic love story between a beautiful soul blindly consumed by the sun, and a lost soul pulling him in, eventually so close that he is snuffed out. Brought back wandering confused as to why. Why is he here? And where is the love he had found? Is there anything next? Where do ghosts go when they die?

Thank you W. W. Norton for the ARC of this title!

[Jade · Rating 5 out of 5]

the world is falling apart and we're still falling in love. roach love motel <3

[Linnae Chau · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 🌟

reading this while i navigate my own grief was affirming, unsettling, and also just sad. i saw this quote on instagram that said acceptance is not accepting the loss, but simply accepting that this ugly, terrible grief is yours now. muriel leung explores what it means to grieve through the lives of mira grieving her partner mal, lucinda grieving her son jojo, shin (literally the ghost of a cockroach— loved him) grieving a lover, Sad grieving an ex partner, his old life, a person he so badly wants to love but is in their own deep grief. ugh, it was a heartache. each of the characters was profoundly haunted, figuratively and literally, and simply wondering how to keep going and keep loving when the world literally (and figuratively) ends. it’s a question i share too. i think we are all just lucky enough until grief shatters our world in one way or another. i see my own life as a time before the monstrous grief and the time after (now) where i shoulder my grief, until one day another person i love enters that then-now chasm, and im not quite as alone anymore. sad, right? this was a beautiful and bizarre book.

[Allyson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Happy Pub Day Review!

I am going to start by saying this book is not going to be for everyone.

This is probably one of the more bizarre books I’ve read. There’s world ending acid rain, a headless man, and a cockroach companion. You definitely need to be open minded and leaning into weird things for it to all make sense. Lucky for me, I am a HUGE fan of weird and really enjoyed this one!

This story has darkness and really ponders tough questions while also having moments that are lighthearted. That’s life though so I liked it. The characters process grief and loss and love and sentimentality and found family.

I really found this book emotional and also weirdly hopeful. It also made me think a lot about ghosts and I have to say, I am a believer.

[Haley · Rating 1 out of 5]

Some of the writing was beautiful, but I really hated this book.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hadn’t heard of this one until a fellow Goodreadser added it to our Afghan Whigs Reading Challenge (which you should absolutely check out, by the way). The premise immediately hooked me: an apocalyptic cli-fi novel where acid rainstorms trap NYC residents in their haunted apartments? How could I possibly say no?

When the rains begin, protagonist Mira makes the wrenching decision to leave her girlfriend Mal and return to her mother’s home. Not long after arriving, she learns her old apartment was destroyed by fire. Grieving and unsure whether Mal survived, Mira begins broadcasting a radio show on love and loss—threading secret messages into each broadcast in case Mal is still out there, listening. Her grief draws her toward Sad, her headless neighbor, who’s mourning a loved one of his own.

This novel is a strange, compelling slow burn that explores the endurance of love, the ache of loss, and the haunted liminal space between them. Where do the dead go when they die? And if you could call them back—would you?

Come for the acid rain, stay for the ghostly heartbreak.

Also, here's the link to the Reading Challenge, if you like creative ways to track and diversify your reading - https://www.goodreads.com/topic/group...

[Glenda Nelms · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird and unusual dystopian novel.

[Amber · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75/5 gifted by the publisher

What I loved
-the setting of the world ending while different characters try to find their peace with it
-the writing is easy to read and strikes a great balance between lit fic that doesn’t feel overly melodramatic
-the magical realism with ghosts is a very fun angle. Idk if others will appreciate it but I love how weird it is especially when describing roach ghost sex 🤣 who would’ve thought

What didn’t work for me
-reads more like a short story collection than fully developed novel. Some chapters have been previously published and it’s quite obvious with the disjointed narrative
-because of the character vignettes, I never feel attached to any POV, especially the FMC’s choices don’t make a lot of sense to me
-I think this book would’ve worked better as interconnected short stories

If you like super weird stories and you’re okay with just going with the flow without lots of things being explained to you, this book will be your jam!!

[Lata · Rating 4 out of 5]

How to even describe this odd and compelling story? New York City has been falling apart due to climate disasters, and acid rain is falling regularly.

Main character Mira has moved back home after being unsuccessful at convincing her partner to come back with her to Mira's mum's apartment. The apartment is in a different borough and travel will soon be impossible between boroughs once the crumbling bridges are closed. The subways are already flooded.

Mira is heartbroken, and lives not only with her mother, but also with the ghosts of Grandpa Why and Shin, a cockroach. She begins transmitting weekly on a HAM radio, secreting messages to Mal in her monologues, in the hope Mal knows she’s missed. Mira also passes the time with another neighbour engaging in meaningless, heartbroken sex.

A headless man begins responding to her messages, and she discovers he lives downstairs in the same building. Mira begins a relationship with him, while life goes on around her in the building, with her mother's friend attempting to call ghosts of residents' loved ones back for them, including her own, dead son.

The prose is gorgeous and evocative. People are lonely, but also hopeful, even while the military maintains peace and movement. People must go to call centres to communicate with people elsewhere, and the acid rain arrives every Tuesday, but there is a building-sized tarp enclosing the apartment for protection.

Loss permeates this story, even while there are moments of humour and love. This is a genuinely hard book to categorize, but it conceives of how despite the disaster befalling the city, and the world, people still have parties, fall in love, get married, and tell stories.

Mira is the main character, and my heart broke for her, but Shin was a standout character for me, with his gentle soul remembering his lost love, yearning to find him, and wondering what comes after life after death…..

Thank you to Netgalley and to W.W. Norton & Company for this ARC in exchange for my review.

[Shweta Ganesh Kumar · Rating 4 out of 5]

What if someone told you an intense fever dream of a story that was a collection of stories that when put together became a novel?
And what if it was so compelling if you let yourself flow with it?
That’s what this book is. Found it on the new fiction shelf of the library and grateful for the writer who wrote it, the publisher who published it and the library who stocked it.

[Erin Swan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully weird and weirdly beautiful - pretty please read this completely original book and love it to death!

[Giada · Rating 3 out of 5]

3+ ...?

This book was so damn confusing
At times lovely, poetic, deep and beautifully sorrowful...
But most of the time just... what the f am I reading and what the f is going on??????
Headless dude? Twice Ghosts?? Cockroach sex???

[Gabriela · Rating 4 out of 5]

So no head?????😤

[Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

5/5

I have a habit of not giving synopses more than a cursory glance -- especially when the title of the novel is as immediately compelling as this -- and whatever information I do pick up in that glance is generally forgotten by the time I actually get around to reading the book. Now, I really don't think any synopsis could have prevented this book from being so delightfully unexpected at every turn. It's often fablelike yet always undeniably modern, it's a post-apocalyptic tale (its concept is somewhat of a cross between two recent reads of mine, Severance and Pink Slime) yet leans heavily into indescribably beautiful bits of magical realism that thoroughly differentiate it from its contemporaries in the genre. There's undeniably a main character, Mira, yet it abandons her immediate perspective early on to bounce between others' eyes, leading it to feel somewhat like a series of interconnected short stories (in fact, per the acknowledgements, at least some of the chapters were originally published in that form) while still managing to always be satisfying in the way it treats Mira's arc. We get fragments of what's going on through these different perspectives, and it's a wonder to witness them piece together into a whole.

There's a gently romantic headless man named Sad (whose early-on introduction immediately told me I would love the book), there's the pensive ghost of a cockroach, and there're a whole lot of people grieving at once, because what else is there to do in a time of unnameable disaster? It's an incredibly creative and idiosyncratic book, yet it doesn't feel detectably ambitious (or at least doesn't strain to be that), as everything flows naturally enough to believe that this was just the way these emotions materialized out of sheer necessity. I mean, how else would you convey love and grief but through a cockroach?

It's comforting and devastating in equal measure, and genuinely one of my favorite things I've read in a while. This book is no less than what it needs to be.

Thank you to W. W. Norton & Company and NetGalley for the eARC.

[Anna · Rating 1 out of 5]

One star cause I stopped reading it. I got too the part about children being born with gills and fins and then her meeting a headless man, getting naked and getting into a fish tank with him.. :/

[Squirrel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cool title, promising setup, lyrical writing, unpleasant read. Ghosts as significant characters, physical limitations irrelevant to full functioning, it STARTS with a split-up so one can stay in the empty family studio apartment leaking acid rain and populated with papers of deceased family members.

This is all about living with delusions, with the "post-apocalyptic" setting as window dressing. As such, might it be considered an extended 'flight of fancy' - by a very depressed author? Not captivated by the characters, scenes, or subject matter. Feels like a collaboration between James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, literary and competent writing, but ... what was the point?

The title and cover art promise odd and zany, but the tale is sad and tedious. If this is meant to be a form of humor, perhaps it is too culturally specific, to come across. Would this work for a reader who believes in ghosts, or has a culture where ghosts are significant? Or is this a riff on such cultures? One character 'creates' ghosts, the ghosts take up real space...

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lot of reviews have said this book is too weird or hard to follow, I almost skipped it, but I found it very accessible and I could hardly put it down. It is absolutely strange, so you just have to roll with it, but I loved all the characters and could feel the apartment building and dissolving city. I don’t think the book answers the title question but I was fascinated by how people, and cockroaches, experience love and loss while the world is literally falling apart around them. Original, beautiful, engrossing; I loved it.

[Jeanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

We think we've experienced acid rain and natural disasters, but nothing like that in the dystopian How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster, where acid rain can eat away your skin, cause mutations, and demolish buildings. Farming was disrupted, buildings draped in acid-proof tarps, and people isolated within their apartment buildings. "We need each other very badly during these times. These days, the world is a giant hole in the sky that is leaking. What can we do about it but try our best?" (pp. 51-52).

And, yet, we continue to love and be irritated by both the living and the dead (many of whom are ghosts living/haunting this apartment building). "And still, if the afterlife is so close enough to touch, I want to touch it. Don’t you? Wouldn’t you try everything in your power if you knew someone you loved was just within reach? Perhaps they are trying to reach you too" (p. 91).

This is an unusual dystopian novel, as it is both deadly serious and ridiculous (one of the ghosts is a cockroach, another is headless). Enjoy it for its silly weirdness. Appreciate its commentary on humanity or grief. Let it remind you that we must change.

[Emily Reid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, what a beautifully written, zany, emotional novel. The end of the world has come with acid rain every Tuesday and Mira is navigating a life fraught with strangeness. Despite the wild circumstances that make the setting of the apocalypse, this is a story of engaging with emotions. Grief, love, anger, loss, and contempt all come into play in this sci-fi, apocalypse, city, life examination mashup.

Suspend some of your questions and roll with the punches (why does that guy still exist without a head? How can he think with no brain? How do cockroaches build a motel?), and enter Leung's world. By the end of this book, I was truly gutted.

Thank you NetGalley and W. W. Norton & Company for this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Sarabeth Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bit on the nose reading a book about love around Valentine's day, I know, and while this book did revolve around love it covered so much more. The world is ending with the apocalypse and New York City is suffering from fatal acid rain every Tuesday and Mira has to figure out which ghosts and people she loves she needs to stay with. In a way, love is not just the good and the gooey but the flip-side as well with longing and loss. There are memorable characters around every corner including a ghost cockroach, a headless lover, and neighbors scaly and horned beyond belief - this story follows along with a little bit of each of them, looking at how a group of people scraping by in an apartment building can find the love and will to live even in the most dire of times.

[Jennifer (wildling_manor) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t believe this book is rated more highly.

It isn’t a book about action but more about the world inside of us. How we manage the ending of things. The world, love, ourselves- and how we somehow persist and preserve.

Clearly, beautifully, bizarrely written by a poet.

I don’t know that I would recommend it someone else though, and I am not sure how I even came to it myself.

It’s heavy, it’s weird. Ghosts, acid rains, dystopian, death, a headless man, a cockroach (and it has an entire scene about f%#*ing) … acid rains more like fever dream. ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

[Geonn Cannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think it's good... just... maybe not for me. It was weird, which I like, and not easily comparable to other books, which I love. Given the setting and the world, it wouldn't have worked at all if it had been more normal. But I think it just wasn't for me.

[sof · Rating 2 out of 5]

a) porno kafkiano
b) capaz I'm too brain rot for this pero no entendí
c) PQ no tiene cabeza
d) El Ultimo cap estuvo bueno pero el final es d las peores cosas q leí
e) ?????????
f) PQ se enterró vivo???
g) PQ algunos sobreviven y otros no
h) tengo muchas preguntas

[Siena · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for an OTB bookclub!

Club consensus: WTF

[rima · Rating 5 out of 5]

i don’t understand a single decision made by the author. i’m very confused in general. 5 stars.

[Talia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strange and beautiful story, I wanted a different ending but I think it’s purposefully not fulfilling

[Jolee · Rating 5 out of 5]

will always love any reflection on community in the face of indescribable danger and apocalypse ❤️

4.5 stars rounded up