Speaker for the Dead

Name: Speaker for the Dead - Paperback
Brand: Tor Books
SKU: 9781250773067
Price: 17.49 USD
Availability: InStock

by Orson Scott Card Paperback

$17.49

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Returns: if a book arrives damaged or isn't the one you ordered, email us within 7 days of delivery and we'll replace it or refund you, usually with nothing to send back. Refund policy

Is this book for you?

Feels: Thoughtful, Melancholy, Hopeful
Kind of story: Literary science fiction, Space opera
About: Family, Grief, Faith, Identity
Pace: Slow burn
How dark: 2 of 5. A little dark
Romance: A subplot

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Featured in our reading guide: Books Like Project Hail Mary: What to Read Next

Three thousand years after the xenocide, Ender Wiggin is called to speak the death of a man on a world that doesn't know who he is.

Shelf note: Our favorite first-contact novel, and you don't need to have read Ender's Game to love it.

Humanity has found a second sentient species: the pequeninos, the "piggies" of the forest world Lusitania. Contact is strictly limited, because everyone remembers what happened the last time humans met an alien race.

Then a xenologer is found dead in the forest, killed by the piggies in a ritual nobody understands. And a Speaker for the Dead is summoned across the light-years to tell the truth of the man's life. The Speaker, unknown to anyone on Lusitania, is the same boy who destroyed an entire species and has spent three millennia trying to atone for it.

Card has said this is the book he actually wanted to write, and that Ender's Game was the runway to get here. It's a quieter, stranger, more adult novel, less about war than about the impossibility and necessity of understanding a mind unlike your own. It won both the Hugo and the Nebula, making Card the first author to take both awards in consecutive years.