THE MUSEUM OF HUMAN HISTORY
Recipient of the 2024 Special Citation from the Philip K. Dick Award
Long-listed for the 2023 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award
A Kirkus Reviews Best Debut of 2023
A Booklist Top 10 First Novel of 2023
A Powell’s Best Book of 2023
Complex, philosophically searching, and gorgeously rendered, Rebekah Bergman’s The Museum of Human History is a sharp and startling debut about a young girl frozen in time in a world obsessed with youth and self-preservation.
After nearly drowning, eight-year-old Maeve Wilhelm falls into a strange comatose state. As years pass, it becomes clear that Maeve is not physically aging. A wide cast of characters finds themselves pulled toward Maeve, each believing that her mysterious “sleep” holds the answers to their life’s most pressing questions: Kevin Marks, a museum owner obsessed with preservation; Monique Gray, a refugee and performance artist; Lionel Wilhelm, an entomologist who dreamed of being an astrophysicist; and Evangeline Wilhelm, Maeve’s identical twin. As Maeve remains asleep, the characters grapple with a mysterious new technology and medical advances that promise to ease anxiety and end pain, but instead cause devastating side effects.
PRAISE
“With melancholy imagination, Bergman elegantly tackles nothing less than the entire arc of human history. . . . the novel blends fairy tale, philosophy, and shades of literary-futurist classics like Never Let Me Go.”
— Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“A startlingly assured debut. . . . Similar to Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. . . . a tightly constructed, wonderfully written, utterly original, and astoundingly good novel.”
— Booklist, Starred Review
“Breathtaking…Bergman’s lyrical prose and keen character insight infuse the novel with near-constant moments of emotional enlightenment”
— Shelf Awareness, Starred Review
“Bergman is a master at bringing multiple characters to life.”
— Wired, a Best Book of Summer
“Magical. . . . A haunting meditation on mortality and memory.”
— Locus
“Winsome. . . . a startling novel about memory, desire, and learning to age with grace.”
— Foreword Reviews
“A very literary, heartbreaking, speculative page-turner about the tragedy of memory, and the desire to hold onto the best moments in your life, and the ways life stories are written and re-written as we move through time.”
— Powell’s, A Most Anticipated Book of 2023
“Rebekah Bergman’s exploration of our strange biologies reads like the irresistible beating hands of time. This daughter of Mary Shelley delights and excites the border between story and science as she doles out questions that both haunt and expose our obsessions.”
— Samantha Hunt, author of The Unwritten Book
“Rebekah Bergman’s The Museum of Human History is one of the most agile novels I have read in a long time. It reads like a documentary retold as a dream retold as a mystery novel. What a wise, good-hearted debut!”
— Kate Bernheimer, author of Fairy Tale Architecture
“In The Museum of Human History, Rebekah Bergman offers readers what we as individuals can rarely see on our own: the interconnectedness that hums between every human being, the high cost of painlessness and hard truths of our inevitable obsolesce. This is a novel about what we want and also what we can’t escape—a story as heartbreaking as it is seductive.”
— Allegra Hyde, author of Eleutheria
“There are no static exhibits or neatly segmented timelines in Bergman’s The Museum of Human History. Here, lives bleed into each other, echoing on decades, centuries, millennia after they end (if they end). A haunting chord of a novel that will hang in the air long after you turn the final page.”
— Tiffany Tsao, author of The Majesties
Rebekah Bergman 