This Great Hemisphere

A Novel

By: Mateo Askaripour

Narrated by: Emana Rachelle

“A thrilling page-turner.”—Brit Bennett, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“Wildly imaginative.”—The Washington Post

“Askaripour soars.”—The Boston Globe

A rallying cry for anyone who has ever felt invisible.

This Great Hemisphere is powerful, captivating novel about how far we’ll go to protect the ones we love. With the worldbuilding of N. K. Jemisin’s novels and blazing defiance of Naomi Alderman’s work, it is also a story about what happens when we resist the narratives others write about us.

Northwestern Hemisphere, 2529: an Earth on which half of people are now born literally invisible. Sweetmint, a young woman, is one of them and thus relegated to second-class citizenship. She has done everything right her entire life, from school to landing a highly sought-after apprenticeship. But all she has fought so hard to earn comes crashing down when she learns that her brother (whom she had presumed dead) is not only alive and well but also the primary suspect in a high-profile political murder.

Sweetmint, an unforgettable character to root for, armed with courage, intellect, and unwavering love for her brother, sets off on a mission to find him before it’s too late. With five days until the hemisphere’s big election, Sweetmint must dodge a relentless law officer and an ambitious politician set on winning the election by any means necessary.

©2024 Mateo Askaripour (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by People, Elle, Betches, Book Riot, CrimeReads and She Reads

“With remarkable world-building, Askaripour takes readers on a vast and winding adventure through a future split by hemispheres, visibility, and power.”
—Elle, "The Best New Books to Read in Summer 2024"

“Part political thriller and part sci-fi, This Great Hemisphere similarly explores the allure of power and the lengths people go to gain and retain it, but it’s also a story about rebellion, resilience and the strength to shape your own future.”
—BookPage

"The page-turning prose and standout characters will appeal to a wide range of readers. Part sf adventure, part mystery, part social satire, this is a vividly imagined and captivating story."
—Booklist *starred review*

Solid Sophomore Novel

Mateo Askaripour follows up his 2020 New York Times best selling novel, Black Buck, with a new book that is sure to be a hit. This Great Hemisphere still has Mateo’s voice in the writing, but in terms of genre, it’s a futuristic journey that I was hooked on. The world-building in this novel is extremely well thought out, to the point that I feel it would make for a good TV series. As for the audiobook, the narrator does an excellent job immersing me into the prose. I would recommend listening to it on 1.2x speed, however, but I’m also admittedly an impatient New Yorker so that’s probably just me.

Kind of long but a good story

It was a pretty good story, it started slow but the ending was good and a different twist

Thin Metaphor and Poor Use of Central Conceit (Invisibility)

I had to force myself to finish this one. The world-building was shallow, and the central conceit — that half of the world’s population was now invisible — was barely functional as a plot device. The author kept finding new ways to nullify the invisibility (lens implants that can see heat, mandatory painting of the skin, etc.), while at the same time writing as though his characters could see each other with no problem. There was lots of eye contact, and looking each other up and down, and waving hello, and noticing expressions or posture, that should have been impossible. Equally aggravating and unexplained, this post-climate-disaster world has no animals, insects, or seasons, and the main character has never seen a flower. And yet - they live in a forest and their diet consists mainly of gardened herbs, root vegetables, and squash varieties. How do these grow without their pollinators and flowers? Finally, the metaphor for the oppression of minorities in the West was painfully obvious. There was little nuance to either the oppressors or the oppressed; the social construct felt one-dimensional, as though the author (who is a person of color) had once read about slavery and the Civil Rights Movement in a history book instead of living his own experience. Skip it.