The Expanded Earth

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 – Emma Hooper, author of Etta and Otto and Russell and James
Mikey Please has one of the most brilliant minds I know; the perfect combination of science, philosophy and madness – Daniel Kwan, Oscar-winning director of Everything Everywhere All At Once
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 * Financial Times *
By turns comic and horrific, The Expanded Earth is a wonderfully sustained celebration of human ingenuity – Declan Burke * The Irish Times *

Mikey Please is a Bristol based BAFTA-winning and OSCAR-nominated writer, director, animator and illustrator. An alumnus of the Royal College of Art (MA Animation) his music videos and short films have garnered over 60 international awards. In 2023 he was appointed as a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Cafe at the Edge of the Woods (HarperCollins), his critically acclaimed debut picture book, has been published in a dozen languages and was the winner of the 2025 Waterstones Children’s Book Prize. A career in making and animating miniature puppets makes him particularly well placed to write a book about tiny people. The Expanded Earth is his first novel.

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