THE TOP TEN TIMES BESTSELLER
A FINANCIAL TIMES 'BEST BOOKS OF SUMMER 2025'

'An excellent, inventive novel' Financial Times

'The Expanded Earth is a wonderfully sustained celebration of human ingenuity' Irish Times

'I loved the fantastic, horrifying, heartwarming, mind-boggling adventure of it' Emma Hooper

'Mikey Please has one of the most brilliant minds I know' Daniel Kwan, director of Everything Everywhere All At Once

Humankind has been reduced to the height of a handspan.
Many do not survive the sudden transformation.
This is the story of those who do.

Frightened and awed in his new body, Giles embarks on a quest across a wildly altered landscape in search of his loved ones, hoping that for all its perils, this new world might offer a chance of redemption.

Elsewhere, deep in the ocean, the spectre of an ancient godlike force stirs, and catastrophe inches closer and closer still.

Welcome to the micropocalypse. Welcome to The Expanded Earth.

Extra content: Includes a brand new story set within the world of 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
By turns comic and horrific, The Expanded Earth is a wonderfully sustained celebration of human ingenuity -- Declan Burke * The Irish Times *
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 *

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 Café at the Edge of the Woods (HarperCollins), his critically acclaimed debut picture book, has been published in a dozen languages and was overal winner of the Waterstones Children's Book Prize 2025. 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.