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THE RED

A considerable novel populated by a cast of memorable characters, who enhance the Mars backdrop instead of depending on it.

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A young man on a Mars colony evades corrupt agents of Earth and learns the truth of his origins in the author’s debut sci-fi/action novel.

Thom is like any other teen—he excels at sports and is contemplating his future. He’s also living on Mars. But after his grandfather dies, everything changes. Thom, a possible suspect, is questioned by authorities. Things only get worse. Two men try to kidnap him and kill his friends, and Thom learns that a bounty hunter, Myron, has been enlisted to track him down. All of his woes can be traced to a war with Martian natives known as the Velitrans, and Thom finds unlikely allies in fighting the Eua, the unquestionably shady government of Earth. Marsh’s plot speeds along with plenty of action scenes, which include one when Elaine—the sister of one of Thom’s friends—escapes captivity and helps Rosha, who leads Thom, et al., to the Velitrans. But it’s the environment and characters that make the book a standout. Mars is a well-established home. It has its own sport, called "endurance," which is essentially a race between teams armed with electrically charged sticks; its own vehicles, such as a “floater”; and its own profanity—the term “fugging” and its variants are a popular word choice. Characters are likable all around, even the villains—the world-weary Detective Cooper-Fonda is so desperate for control he gives himself the call sign of “Boss.” Desmond, “Desi” to his friends, is perhaps the book’s best character. He supplies much of the humor, incessantly complaining that people don’t bother to learn his name, but he’s also a skilled programmer, rewriting a com’s operating system in mere minutes, and has ties to the main plot—Myron grabs Desi first before looking for Thom. The work includes enjoyable add-ons like a bad guy identified by a discernible wound (a defensive bite from Elaine), as well as a bulky second-to-last chapter, with multiple characters converging for a searing action set piece.

A considerable novel populated by a cast of memorable characters, who enhance the Mars backdrop instead of depending on it.

Pub Date: July 30, 2012

ISBN: 978-1478279068

Page Count: 272

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2012

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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DEVOLUTION

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

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WHAT WE CAN KNOW

A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.

A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.

McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.

A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.

Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025

ISBN: 9780593804728

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025

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