Nothing on Earth

by Ian MacKenzie

"I often traveled for work." So begins Nothing On Earth, a propulsive novel that tells the story of Anna Hendrix, an American spy, as she seeks answers for the appearance of a mysterious and potentially powerful metal of unknown origin.
For a long time, Anna was in counterterrorism, but now she is on a new mission, one which has friends and enemies across the globe scrambling to find answers. Her pursuit will take her from the Horn of Africa to Southeast Asia—through expatriate enclaves and the NGO communities in which she cultivates her cover and extracts information from a wide cast of characters: aid workers, diplomats, foreign correspondents, energy magnates, insurgents, dissident, and of course, other spies.

As the pressure mounts to find the original source of the metal, Anna must make choices with life-changing implications not just for herself, but for the people with whom she deals, always bearing in mind the young daughter waiting for her back home. In Nothing on Earth, novelist Ian MacKenzie reimagines a pivotal decade in the Pax Americana, from the killing of Osama bin Laden to the storming of the Capitol. Anna’s voice—lean, understated, unflappable—is our companion and guide through the dark topography of geopolitical power, and in the end, the furthest reaches of human comprehension.

For fans of Rachel Cusk and John Le Carré alike, this is a story of power and secrecy, geopolitics and science, parenthood and loss, and the question of how we know what we think we know, how we make sense of our existence on Earth.

488 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication May 26, 2026

About the author

Ian MacKenzie is the author of the novel FEAST DAYS, forthcoming in March 2018 from Little, Brown, as well as a previous novel, CITY OF STRANGERS. His fiction has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. He was born and raised in Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard College, and has lived in New York City, Ethiopia, and Brazil. He currently lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughter.

Reviews

[Debbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful book. The female lead is an American spy with a daughter and takes us through her life across multiple countries. There is a unidentfied metal that features as a key part of her work. Beautifully written, it is lyrical and full of adventure and spy engagements. I loved the theme of motherhood also running through the book. Will definitely be following up on this author’s works. Thank you to the author. Thank you to #netgalley and the publisher for an ARC.

[Paul Wagenbreth · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title of Ian Mackenzie’s intriguing but not entirely riveting “Nothing on Earth,” with its reference to a substance seemingly not of our planet, could as well apply to the categorization of the novel itself, with how it defies ready assignment to any of literature’s usual genres.
Sci-fi, with the unknown substance? To some extent, certainly, with the implied extraterrestrial contact, though for all the woo-woo-ness of the substance (it’s what drew me to the novel) it’s not really front and center in the way of, say, the otherworldly device in Jerry Sohl’s “Costigan’s Needle” which makes for a portal into another dimension.
Not so fantastic as that, author Mackenzie’s conceit, but close, even though, as I say, the sci–fi element isn’t really paramount, and indeed drops out for extended periods.
So if not sci-fi, maybe spy fiction, the novel? Certainly there's a case to be made for that, with how the chief character, government agent Kate, assumes various identities as she transports herself to foreign locales seeking the truth behind the substance, even almost getting herself killed in one of the novel’s most arresting moments.
Finally, though, the spy element, like the sci-fi business, isn’t paramount either and also drops out for extended periods as the novel pivots into domestic drama, with Kate saying of her Korean-American lover that her passionate affair with him is the sort you have only two or three times in life (I’d say once in a lifetime if you’re lucky).
Most noteworthy about the liaison, though, which has felt the stresses of its principals pursuing their respective careers, is her relationship with their daughter and the occasion it makes for her ruminations about pregnancy and motherhood, including some pretty eye-opening stuff you're not likely to know about.
Something, for instance, I certainly didn’t know about is that traces of a fetus’ DNA remain in the mother’s blood for years or even decades and that fetal cells even migrate toward the site of a mother’s wound in an apparent healing effort long after the birth – a bit of real-life sci-fi-ness which even Kate’s attending doctor, for all her years practicing medicine, still finds hard to believe.
But perhaps an even more startling thing about pregnancy and early childhood (and this is something I did know about) is that possible evidence of reincarnation has been found to be most prevalent in very young children, something Kate registers when she notices that sometimes her baby’s eyes seemed focused on a point behind her, as if the child were seeing something Kate wasn’t seeing – as if “the baby was still connected to some extent with the other place she’d come from and still able to interact with it.”
Distinctly loftier heights than simply sci-fi or espionage fiction, then, the novel aspires to, even becoming unabashedly philosophical at times, as in its extended discussion of philosophy’s Trolley Problem, in which someone is imagined to be next to a switch at a railway junction and must decide whether to let a runaway train continue down the track and kill five people or pull the switch to divert the train to another track but at the cost of a single bystander who happens to be on the second track.
Reminiscent such philosophical speculation was for me of another novel with higher aspirations than its mystery genre, Louise Doughty’s “Apple Tree Yard,” in which, speaking of motherhood, an experiment is described in which a monkey and its baby are placed in a cage with an electrified floor and while the mother initially seeks to protect the baby by standing on the floor herself, invariably after a time she stands on the baby to protect herself (who comes up with such experiments?)
Equally interesting to me, too, with my literary background (though perhaps not so interesting to the general layman), is Kate’s reflection, a propos of her study of languages, that “you weren’t yourself in a foreign language – or, rather, you were a different, parallel version, a self slightly altered.”
Decidedly philosophical, as I say, the book gets at such times, plumbing terrain not usually explored in novels, even decidedly literary ones. Also, with Kate’ journeys into the miasma of the Third World, the book took on heart-of-darkness-like vibes of such writers as Phil Caputo or Lawrence Osborne or the Joan Didion of “Democracy.”
So: a medley of different genres, Mackenzie's novel, which, for all that its various threads piqued me intellectually, had me even underscoring particularly striking passages, nevertheless worked against the more personal engagement that a less variegated novel might have made for me.

[Margaret C · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nothing on Earth is an extraordinary and multi dimensional novel that I found intriguing.
It is told from the perspective of Anna, an American spy and mother, whose mission is to find and gather intelligence, ahead of America’s rivals, on a mysterious, unworldly metal of unknown origin. The story unfolds over a decade of geopolitical turmoil, from the Horn of Africa to Southeast Asia. We are taken on a vivid journey through these unstable regions, meeting a wide variety of characters, not all what they seem. Running along side this is the theme of a working mother, her daughter and her relationship with her daughter’s Korean father. I wouldn’t call it a high action novel but it’s strength comes from the it’s plausibility, despite the sci fi element and of course it’s very well drawn characters.
Overall a fascinating read!
Thank you to NetGalley and Unnamed Press for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.