About

Mr B's Emporium is incredibly excited to welcome BAFTA award-winning storyteller Mikey Please to Mr B's to discuss his debut adult novel, The Expanded Earth.

The Expanded Earth is book one in a beautifully illustrated trilogy, in which everyone, everywhere on earth, is reduced in a flash to the height of a pint glass. What is responsible for the sudden change and how will we cope with our new shrunken perspective on the world?

Mikey Please is a Bristol based writer, director, animator, and illustrator. He was the creator and co-director of the Oscar-winning Aardman film Robin Robin, and his critically acclaimed debut picture book, The Café at the Edge of the Woods, was a huge team favourite – so much so that Mikey even illustrated our 2024 Christmas catalogue, and our shop window!

Mikey's career in making and animating miniature puppets makes him particularly well placed to write a book about tiny people, and we can't wait to hear more about this mindbending novel!

About the book:

Humankind has been reduced to the height of handspan – a transformation that is both potentially lethal and exasperatingly inconvenient. On a remote coastal path, Giles awakes in his new body to discover a world reshaped and magnified into a place of astounding abundance and deadly peril. Desperate to reconnect with his loved ones, he seeks the help of fellow survivors, and together they embark on a quest across the altered landscape.

But as their journey unfolds, the more the question persists – are they still truly human, or has their reduction in size marked the beginning of a descent into savagery, an evolution into something other? Elsewhere, one week earlier, Professor Elizabeth Goodwin makes a monumental discovery – God is alive and physically among us, but not in the form we've been taught to expect. As Goodwin prepares to make first contact with the omnipresent ocean-spanning creature, forces conspire in the wings, and the spectre of imminent catastrophe inches closer and closer still…

Dark, witty, and wildly ambitious, Mikey Please guides us into The Expanded Earth, a high-stakes adventure packed with jeopardy and life-affirming beauty – a story that ultimately celebrates the capacity of small things to effect great change. The first in a spellbinding trilogy, this beautifully illustrated debut novel marks the arrival of a new talent and perhaps a new genre – the world of the micropocalypse.

'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