Tere Liye is a famous novelist in Indonesia. His writing style is different every time because he likes to experiment. His novels talk about different themes, starting from politics, technology, the environment, and many more. One of his book titled "Hujan" has all three of them. Hujan, that means rain, was first published on January 2016. The book Hujan is about friendship, love, parting, forgetting, and rain as per the exact words of the summary.

The book takes place in the far future in which the technology there is very advanced. The main character is a girl named Lail. The story is written in flashbacks, where the girl retells her story to someone. Her flashback will start from when she was still 13 and move from one year to another and another until it reaches the present that is 8 years later.

Lail starts her story with when the 10th billion baby was born. On that day, the whole world experienced a massive earthquake due to a super volcano eruption. The earthquake with a scale of 10 Richter killed many people. The vulcanic dust that is sprayed to the sky by the volcano kept on pouring out, suffocating people and making the earth temperature colder. The world was in havoc. Time skip, the politics wanted to launch something to the atmosphere in order to make the earth warmer. Scientists disagreed to launch anything into the atmosphere, the atmosphere would return to normal by itself. Nonetheless, despite scientists disagreement, something was launched into the atmosphere. The world did get warmer, and it kept on getting warmer, until there was no cloud in sight. No more rain fell down, and the sun became scorching hot. A few countries rounded up the smartest of scientists and formed a pact that is kept secret from the world. They made a project to create an spaceship where selected people will live at outer space until the earth atmosphere returns to normal, which is an unspecified amount of time. The purpose of this project is to ensure that humanity would live on and not die out.

What this has to do with Lail, is that the leading scientist is her love interest and they both love each other. Lail isn't one of the selected people to go to outer space. Esok, the leading scientist, has a ticket for himself and a plus one. But his plus one ticket is given to someone else, his cousin. Esok have decided to not board the spaceship, though Lail doesn't know that. Esok was busy finishing the preparation for the spaceship launch so he didn't keep in contact with Lail. Whereas Lail was in preparation to remove the painful memory with Esok using the advance technology. When it was time to remove the memory, nothing could be found. Lail have accepted her memory with Esok and she doesn't have a painful memory to remove anymore. Both Lail and Esok then continued to live on earth together where a few years later they got married.

This book talks about the environment. In the face of nature and natural disaster, human can't do anything. Human shouldn't interfere in nature, because like the politics who wanted to make the earth warmer they have worsened the situation. Selected humans were even sent to outer space to ensure that humanity won't become extinct. We can learn from this novel that if we do things too rashly, we can worsen the situation. Like the example with launching chemicals into the atmosphere. When we do something there will always be an effect.

This book is still in Indonesian and there is no word of translations yet. But I do hope in the near future that Tere Liye's book would have English translations. From the people who read all his works, his writing is incredible and they all talk about real world situation. The book Hujan gave me mixed feeling. I'm amazed by the book. Amazed with the situation in the book, how it feels realistic although it takes place in the far future.