Winner of the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet meets Ender's Game in this gripping science fiction debut from an award-winning voice in SFF
While we live, the enemy shall fear us.
Since she was born, Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of planet Earth. Raised in the bowels of Gaea Station alongside the last scraps of humanity, she readies herself to face the Wisdom, the powerful, reality-shaping weapon that gave the majoda their victory over humanity.
They are what’s left. They are what must survive. Kyr is one of the best warriors of her generation, the sword of a dead planet. When Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates her to Nursery to bear sons until she dies trying, she knows she must take humanity's revenge into her own hands.
Alongside her brother’s brilliant but seditious friend and a lonely, captive alien, Kyr escapes from everything she’s known into a universe far more complicated than she was taught and far more wondrous than she could have imagined.
Staff Choice: Sophie
This is a dystopian sci-fi centered around Kyr, star pupil of the military of the remnant of human civilization living on a space station. She is an unpleasant character, hell-bent on seeking revenge for the destruction of humanity. And then... things shift, as her life's path turns into something she was not expecting, and she has to deal with it. I absolutely scarfed up this book in one day (and it had been a long time since I'd done that). I loved the world-building, the themes, the characters (awful though some of them were), the very real choices Kyr had to make at every turn (and there were quite a few turns), and a lot more. Something that started out as straight-up military sci-fi turned into a something else a whole lot more thought-provoking.
Staff Choice: Iris
A massive departure from the cozy, folkloric novella duology I'd read from this author before, Some Desperate Glory is an ambitious sci-fi dystopian story that weighs in at almost 500 pages. The main character, Kyr, comes from a small, militaristic human colony and has been trained as an elite fighter pretty much from birth. She's smart and fast and ruthless, and she knows she's destined to avenge the destruction of Earth. Until some things happen that turn everything upside down, and Kyr starts to wonder... what if her people are not the good guys after all?
