The Expanded Earth
On sale
2nd April 2026
Price: £10.99
THE TOP TEN TIMES BESTSELLER
A FINANCIAL TIMES ‘BEST BOOKS OF SUMMER 2025’
‘An excellent, inventive novel’ Financial Times
‘The Expanded Earth is a wonderfully sustained celebration of human ingenuity’ Irish Times
‘I loved the fantastic, horrifying, heartwarming, mind-boggling adventure of it’ Emma Hooper
‘Mikey Please has one of the most brilliant minds I know’ Daniel Kwan, director of Everything Everywhere All At Once
A strange siren-song sounds around the world and in an instant humankind shrinks to the height of a handspan. Everyone wakes up tiny: in years to come the moment will be known as The Descent.
Many do not survive. This story is about what happens to those who do.
Those who wake to find themselves transformed, the world around them reshaped and magnified into a place of astounding abundance and deadly peril.
Who travel their altered lands and must adapt, forge new communities, or fight against them.
Those who will come to know the Godlike force that has been awakened, not in the skies as we’ve been taught to expect, but in the oceans below . . .
Welcome to the micropcalypse. Welcome to The Expanded Earth.
A FINANCIAL TIMES ‘BEST BOOKS OF SUMMER 2025’
‘An excellent, inventive novel’ Financial Times
‘The Expanded Earth is a wonderfully sustained celebration of human ingenuity’ Irish Times
‘I loved the fantastic, horrifying, heartwarming, mind-boggling adventure of it’ Emma Hooper
‘Mikey Please has one of the most brilliant minds I know’ Daniel Kwan, director of Everything Everywhere All At Once
A strange siren-song sounds around the world and in an instant humankind shrinks to the height of a handspan. Everyone wakes up tiny: in years to come the moment will be known as The Descent.
Many do not survive. This story is about what happens to those who do.
Those who wake to find themselves transformed, the world around them reshaped and magnified into a place of astounding abundance and deadly peril.
Who travel their altered lands and must adapt, forge new communities, or fight against them.
Those who will come to know the Godlike force that has been awakened, not in the skies as we’ve been taught to expect, but in the oceans below . . .
Welcome to the micropcalypse. Welcome to The Expanded Earth.
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Reviews
By turns comic and horrific, The Expanded Earth is a wonderfully sustained celebration of human ingenuity
Mikey Please has one of the most brilliant minds I know; the perfect combination of science, philosophy and madness
It's one thing to portray just a single person or a handful of individuals getting reduced in size. In Mikey Please's The Expanded Earth, by contrast, that very fate is visited forcibly upon the entire global population, and of those who undergo the transformation - a repulsive, traumatic experience - only a small fraction emerge alive. An excellent, inventive novel from an author whose career in stop-motion animation, including work for Aardman, appears to have given him a solid grounding in seeing things from a small-scale perspective
The Expanded Earth genuinely changed the way I look at the world around me. I loved the fantastic, horrifying, heartwarming, mind-boggling adventure of it. Mikey Please is a singular breed of genius and this book proves it yet again