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A darkly brilliant novel about the scientists who tried to warn us the world was heading toward collapse.
“Start reading it—I dare you to put it down.”—Emmanuel Carrère
Berkeley, 1973. In a cramped university department powered by one of the world’s earliest supercomputers, four young researchers make a terrifying discovery: if industrial and population growth continue unchecked, modern civilization will collapse within a century.
The group reacts in radically different ways. Idealistic married couple Mildred and Eugene Dundee dedicate themselves to sounding the alarm. Ambitious French economist Paul Quérillot turns catastrophe into opportunity. And Johannes Gudsonn—the team’s enigmatic mathematical genius—disappears entirely.
Fifty years later, as climate disaster and political instability reshape the planet the academics once tried to save, a journalist sets out to track Gudsonn down, following his trail to a remote Norwegian fjord in search of answers about the prediction that changed so many lives forever.
Inspired by the true story behind the landmark 1972 report The Limits to Growth, Abel Quentin’s Hut is at once an intellectual thriller, a fierce satire of modernity, and a deeply human portrait of a generation that foresaw catastrophe—and failed to stop it.
“The story of four lives, from the 1960s to the present day, becomes an extraordinary vehicle for recounting our sleepwalking march toward catastrophe. This is a book that tackles questions of vital urgency with intellectual rigor and astonishing narrative force. Start reading it—I dare you to put it down.”—Emmanuel Carrère, best-selling author of Yoga
“A brilliant panoramic novel moving across decades, milieus, and continents. The book’s narrator—an idealistic, somewhat disoriented journalist—is the lone faintly comic figure in this journey through the shattered illusions of modern progress.”—Internazionale
“A brilliantly orchestrated ensemble novel—unexpectedly funny given its subject matter—telling the story of the moment we had a chance to save the world and chose not to.”—Corriere della Sera