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MERU

A complex and sometimes slow-moving but ultimately rewarding novel.

A galaxy-spanning space opera about two lost souls determined to prove themselves.

As the adopted human child of two more-than-human parents known as "alloys," Jayanthi wants nothing more than to prove she has the skills to design new genomes. But when her mentor tells her she’ll never achieve her goals, she starts to look for another way to prove her worth. When she realizes that her sickle-cell disorder could actually be a beneficial adaptation on the newly discovered planet of Meru, her mentor comes up with a new plan—to send Jayanthi herself to Meru in an attempt to prove that humans can once again be allowed to explore the universe without making harmful changes to a planet’s biosphere. Meanwhile, Vaha, an alloy whose body is adapted to live in the vacuum of space, is desperate to prove that zie isn’t the failure as a pilot that zir maker believed zie was. With no other offers for work coming in, Vaha jumps at the chance to carry Jayanthi to Meru, continue practicing new types of flight in orbit around a planet, and hopefully fulfill zir maker’s ultimate design for zir life. Throwing two lonely people with something to prove together is a great recipe for drama, and these characters and their relationship do create a strong throughline for the novel. The world presented here is rich and complicated, but it’s so different from our own that the resulting exposition and explanations can have the effect of distancing the reader from the characters. Still, the love story, plus plenty of jaw-dropping space scenes, will reward readers patient enough to explore this far-future world.

A complex and sometimes slow-moving but ultimately rewarding novel.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2023

ISBN: 978-1-6625-0509-6

Page Count: 447

Publisher: 47North

Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022

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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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