Haunting yet compassionate, this masterful slice of dystopian fiction from the author of Strange Weather in Tokyo imagines the end of our species as we know it as small tribes of humans have to resort to extreme measures in an attempt to survive.

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025

In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of the Mothers.

Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings - but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.

Unfolding over geological eons, Under the Eye of the Big Bird is at once an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it and a meditation on the qualities that, for better and worse, make us human.