It’s been some considerable time since I wrote a comprehensive book review. But maybe that’s not surprising, since it’s rare these days that a book I have read for pleasure will move me to quite the extent required for me to write a review.
This one was quite different.
NB: Amazon affiliate link
If you follow this blog regularly, you’ll know that we moved house recently. And this meant all our books had to be rearranged on new shelves. Oh, the joy!
My dear husband, because he’s a sensible and rational soul (unlike yours truly), left this wonderful task to me for two reasons. Firstly, he knows it makes me happy to have things arranged just so, especially books, and secondly, if I’d let him do it, there would have been all manner of chaos, like having the historical romance mixed up with biographies or some such. That kind of thing keeps me awake at night.
Anyway, the book. It belongs to the husband, of course – I couldn’t tell you the last time I bought a science fiction novel. I saw the cover and it wowed me. I mean, it’s eye-catching, right? So, naturally, I read the blurb on the back and… well, the rest is history:
It’s a hefty tome at 600 pages, but never did I feel that it became tedious, and it kept me utterly gripped from start to finish. In short, I read it in about five days, in between writing and editing work. For a book of that size, that’s pretty good going for me.
The majority of the plot is split between two distinct groups: the last remaining humans aboard the spaceship Gilgamesh, searching for a new home following the destruction of Earth; and another species, who have evolved on a green planet that was terraformed by a previous human civilisation. The result is a story that is full of conflict – between the humans themselves, between this other species and their environment, and inside myself as to which camp I wanted to ‘succeed’.
This a novel of survival, but it touches on so many other themes, and left me with many searching and profound questions. For example, why is it that humans seek always to conquer rather than cohabit? It also left me pondering the nature of religion, as it appears in the book. Powerful subjects that require debate over a bottle of wine, methinks.
The biggest question now, of course, is this: In leaving my review on Amazon itself, I learn this is merely the first in a trilogy. How long will it be before I succumb to the lure of buying the remaining two books…?
Happy reading, guys!
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