MobileRead April 2016 Book Club Nominations

[WT Sharpe]

Help us select the book that the MobileRead Book Club will read for April, 2016.

The nominations will run through midnight EST March 26 or until 10 books have made the list. The poll will then be posted and will remain open for five days.

Book selection category for April is: Award Winners.

In order for a book to be included in the poll it needs THREE NOMINATIONS (original nomination, a second and a third).

How Does This Work?
The Mobile Read Book Club (MRBC) is an informal club that requires nothing of you. Each month a book is selected by polling. On the last week of that month a discussion thread is started for the book. If you want to participate feel free. There is no need to "join" or sign up. All are welcome.

How Does a Book Get Selected?
Each book that is nominated will be listed in a poll at the end of the nomination period. The book that polls the most votes will be the official selection.

How Many Nominations Can I Make?
Each participant has 3 nominations. You can nominate a new book for consideration or nominate (second, third) one that has already been nominated by another person.

How Do I Nominate a Book?
Please just post a message with your nomination. If you are the FIRST to nominate a book, please try to provide an abstract to the book so others may consider their level of interest.

How Do I Know What Has Been Nominated?
Just follow the thread. This message will be updated with the status of the nominations as often as I can. If one is missed, please just post a message with a multi-quote of the 3 nominations and it will be added to the list ASAP.

When is the Poll?
The poll thread will open at the end of the nomination period, or once there have been 10 books with 3 nominations each. At that time a link to the initial poll thread will be posted here and this thread will be closed.

The floor is open to nominations. Please comment if you discover a nomination is not available as an ebook in your area.


Official choices with three nominations each:

(1) Murphy by Samuel Beckett
Amazon US / Kobo

Spoiler:

This novel also made the Guardian's Best 100 Novels of All Time list. Quotes from the article:

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” Samuel Beckett’s entry into this series with his characteristically bleak, nihilistic humour, marks another milestone: the first appearance since Shakespeare of a writer who will innovate as brilliantly in theatre as much as in poetry and prose. Beckett, indeed, is one of the giants of 20th-century literature, in any language.

Murphy is an absurdist masterpiece, a first novel that emerged from a long literary apprenticeship, mainly conducted in post-first world war Paris. It was the first substantial work by a young man – Beckett was born on Good Friday, 13 April, 1906 in Foxrock, just south of Dublin – who had been experimenting for years with poetry and prose, partly influenced by James Joyce, for whom he also worked as an unconventional secretary.

[quote]Murphy is a showcase for Beckett’s uniquely comic voice, his command of absurdist narrative, and fascination with existential, mind-body issues of being and nothingness.[quote]

(2) Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
Amazon UK / Amazon US / eBooks.com / Google Play / Kobo UK / Kobo US / Overdrive / Sainsbury's

Spoiler:

In his most ambitious project to date, award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson utilizes years of research and cutting-edge science in the first of three novels that will chronicle the colonization of Mars.

For eons, sandstorms have swept the barren desolate landscape of the red planet. For centuries, Mars has beckoned to mankind to come and conquer its hostile climate. Now, in the year 2026, a group of one hundred colonists is about to fulfill that destiny.

John Boone, Maya Toitavna, Frank Chalmers, and Arkady Bogdanov lead a mission whose ultimate goal is the terraforming of Mars. For some, Mars will become a passion driving them to daring acts of courage and madness; for others it offers and opportunity to strip the planet of its riches. And for the genetic "alchemists, " Mars presents a chance to create a biomedical miracle, a breakthrough that could change all we know about life...and death.

The colonists place giant satellite mirrors in Martian orbit to reflect light to the planets surface. Black dust sprinkled on the polar caps will capture warmth and melt the ice. And massive tunnels, kilometers in depth, will be drilled into the Martian mantle to create stupendous vents of hot gases. Against this backdrop of epic upheaval, rivalries, loves, and friendships will form and fall to pieces--for there are those who will fight to the death to prevent Mars from ever being changed.

Brilliantly imagined, breathtaking in scope and ingenuity, Red Mars is an epic scientific saga, chronicling the next step in human evolution and creating a world in its entirety. Red Mars shows us a future, with both glory and tarnish, that awes with complexity and inspires with vision.

Red Mars won a Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (1994, 1997).

(3) Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlan and the Great Depression by Alan Brinkley
Amazon US / B&N nook / Kobo

Spoiler:

1983 winner of the National Book Award for History.

Will readers of today will see parallels between the politics of the '30s and the politics of this year's presidential race?

(4) A Cold Day for Murder by Dana Stabenow
Amazon UK / Amazon US / Audible UK / Audible US / Kobo (US) / Stabenow.com

Spoiler:

This was an Edgar Award winner in 1992 as a paperback original, and a delightful read.

Originally Posted by Dana Stabenow:
It’s December in the Park, and a ranger is missing. It’s no great loss to the rest of the Park rats, they figure he’s stumbled into a snowbank and will re-emerge come breakup, just in time for the ground to thaw and them to bury him. But when the man sent to look for him also disappears, Kate Shugak, ex-investigator for the Anchorage D.A. and Park homesteader, is sent in search of them both.
First in the Kate Shugak series. Yes, this is the one that was lost for two years in my father’s garage and went on to win the Edgar award.

Originally Posted by Amazon:
Somewhere in the hinterlands of Alaska, among the millions of sprawling acres that comprise “The Park,” a young National Park Ranger has gone missing. When the detective sent after him also vanishes, the Anchorage DA’s department must turn to their reluctant former investigator, Kate Shugak. Shugak knows The Park because she’s of The Park, an Aleut who left her home village of Niniltna to pursue education, a career, and justice in an unjust world. Kate’s search for the missing men will take her from self-imposed exile back to a life she’d left behind, and face-to-face with people and problems she'd hoped never to confront again.

(5) The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
Amazon Ca / Amazon UK / AmazonUS / B&N / Kobo / Overdrive

Spoiler:

The work was serialized in Science Fiction World in 2006, published as a book in 2008 and became one of the most popular science fiction novels in China. It received the Chinese Science Fiction Galaxy Award in 2006. A film adaptation of the same name is scheduled for release in July 2016.

An English translation by Ken Liu was published by Tor Books in 2014. It won the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel and was nominated for the 2014 Nebula Award for Best Novel.
Quote:
1967: Ye Wenjie witnesses Red Guards beat her father to death during China's Cultural Revolution. This singular event will shape not only the rest of her life but also the future of mankind.

Four decades later, Beijing police ask nanotech engineer Wang Miao to infiltrate a secretive cabal of scientists after a spate of inexplicable suicides. Wang's investigation will lead him to a mysterious online game and immerse him in a virtual world ruled by the intractable and unpredictable interaction of its three suns.

This is the Three-Body Problem and it is the key to everything: the key to the scientists' deaths, the key to a conspiracy that spans light-years and the key to the extinction-level threat humanity now faces.

(6) Hominids (Neanderthal Parallax Book 1) by Robert J. Sawyer
Amazon Ca / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Kobo

Spoiler:

From Amazon:

Robert Sawyer's SF novels are perennial nominees for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, or both. Clearly, he must be doing something right since each one has been something new and different. What they do have in common is imaginative originality, great stories, and unique scientific extrapolation. His latest is no exception. [NOTE: This is no longer his "latest" — Tom.]

Hominids is a strong, stand-alone SF novel, but it's also the first book of The Neanderthal Parallax, a trilogy that will examine two unique species of people. They are alien to each other, yet bound together by the never-ending quest for knowledge and, beneath their differences, a common humanity. We are one of those species, the other is the Neanderthals of a parallel world where they, not Homo sapiens, became the dominant intelligence. In that world, Neanderthal civilization has reached heights of culture and science comparable to our own, but is very different in history, society, and philosophy.

During a risky experiment deep in a mine in Canada, Ponter Boddit, a Neanderthal physicist, accidentally pierces the barrier between worlds and is transferred to our universe, where in the same mine another experiment is taking place. Hurt, but alive, he is almost immediately recognized as a Neanderthal, but only much later as a scientist. He is captured and studied, alone and bewildered, a stranger in a strange land. But Ponter is also befriended-by a doctor and a physicist who share his questing intelligence and boundless enthusiasm for the world's strangeness, and especially by geneticist Mary Vaughan, a lonely woman with whom he develops a special rapport.

Meanwhile, Ponter's partner, Adikor Huld, finds himself with a messy lab, a missing body, suspicious people all around, and an explosive murder trial that he can't possibly win because he has no idea what actually happened. Talk about a scientific challenge!

Contact between humans and Neanderthals creates a relationship fraught with conflict, philosophical challenge, and threat to the existence of one species or the other-or both-but equally rich in boundless possibilities for cooperation and growth on many levels, from the practical to the esthetic to the scientific to the spiritual. In short, Robert J. Sawyner has done it again.

Hominids is the winner of the 2003 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

(7) The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Amazon Ca / Amazon US / Audible / Kobo US

Spoiler:

This book was on Benioff's top-10 list and won the Booker. From Wikipedia:

The White Tiger is the debut novel by Indian author Aravind Adiga. It was first published in 2008 and won the 40th Man Booker Prize in the same year.[1] The novel provides a darkly humorous perspective of India’s class struggle in a globalized world as told through a retrospective narration from Balram Halwai, a village boy.
<snipped for plotty points>
...the novel examines issues of religion, caste, loyalty, corruption and poverty in India.

(8) The Long Quiche Goodbye by Avery Aames
Amazon Ca / Amazon UK / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Google Play / Kobo / Overdrive

Spoiler:

Winner of the 2010 Agatha Award for Best First Novel.

From Amazon:
Welcome to the grand opening of Fromagerie Bessette. Or as it's more commonly known by the residents of small-town Providence, Ohio-the Cheese Shop. Proprietor Charlotte Bessette has prepared a delightful sampling of bold Cabot Clothbound Cheddar, delicious tortes of Stilton and Mascarpone, and a taste of Sauvignon Blanc-but someone else has decided to make a little crime of passion the piece de resistance. Right outside the shop Charlotte finds a body, the victim stabbed to death with one of her prized olive-wood handled knives.

The nominations are now closed.

[WT Sharpe]

Wondering if a particular book is available in your country? The following spoiler contains a list of bookstores outside the United States you can search. If you don't see a bookstore on this list for your country, find one that is, send me the link via PM, and I'll add it to the list. Also, if you find one on the list that is no longer in operation, let me know and I'll remove it from the list.

Spoiler:

Australian
Angus Robertson
Booktopia
Borders
Dymocks
Fishpond
Google

Canada
Amazon. Make sure you are logged out. Then go to the Kindle Store. Search for a book. After the search results come up, in the upper right corner of the screen, change the country to Canada and search away.
Google
Sony eBookstore (Upper right corner switch to/from US/CA)

UK
BooksOnBoard (In the upper right corner is a way to switch to the UK store)
Amazon
Foyle's
Google
Penguin
Random House
Waterstones
WH Smith

*** Murphy by Samuel Beckett [issybird, CRussel, bfisher]
Amazon US / Kobo

Spoiler:

This novel also made the Guardian's Best 100 Novels of All Time list. Quotes from the article:

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” Samuel Beckett’s entry into this series with his characteristically bleak, nihilistic humour, marks another milestone: the first appearance since Shakespeare of a writer who will innovate as brilliantly in theatre as much as in poetry and prose. Beckett, indeed, is one of the giants of 20th-century literature, in any language.

Murphy is an absurdist masterpiece, a first novel that emerged from a long literary apprenticeship, mainly conducted in post-first world war Paris. It was the first substantial work by a young man – Beckett was born on Good Friday, 13 April, 1906 in Foxrock, just south of Dublin – who had been experimenting for years with poetry and prose, partly influenced by James Joyce, for whom he also worked as an unconventional secretary.

[quote]Murphy is a showcase for Beckett’s uniquely comic voice, his command of absurdist narrative, and fascination with existential, mind-body issues of being and nothingness.[quote]

*** Hominids (Neanderthal Parallax Book 1) by Robert J. Sawyer [WT Sharpe, CRussel, JSWolf]
Amazon Ca / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Kobo

Spoiler:

From Amazon:

Robert Sawyer's SF novels are perennial nominees for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, or both. Clearly, he must be doing something right since each one has been something new and different. What they do have in common is imaginative originality, great stories, and unique scientific extrapolation. His latest is no exception. [NOTE: This is no longer his "latest" — Tom.]

Hominids is a strong, stand-alone SF novel, but it's also the first book of The Neanderthal Parallax, a trilogy that will examine two unique species of people. They are alien to each other, yet bound together by the never-ending quest for knowledge and, beneath their differences, a common humanity. We are one of those species, the other is the Neanderthals of a parallel world where they, not Homo sapiens, became the dominant intelligence. In that world, Neanderthal civilization has reached heights of culture and science comparable to our own, but is very different in history, society, and philosophy.

During a risky experiment deep in a mine in Canada, Ponter Boddit, a Neanderthal physicist, accidentally pierces the barrier between worlds and is transferred to our universe, where in the same mine another experiment is taking place. Hurt, but alive, he is almost immediately recognized as a Neanderthal, but only much later as a scientist. He is captured and studied, alone and bewildered, a stranger in a strange land. But Ponter is also befriended-by a doctor and a physicist who share his questing intelligence and boundless enthusiasm for the world's strangeness, and especially by geneticist Mary Vaughan, a lonely woman with whom he develops a special rapport.

Meanwhile, Ponter's partner, Adikor Huld, finds himself with a messy lab, a missing body, suspicious people all around, and an explosive murder trial that he can't possibly win because he has no idea what actually happened. Talk about a scientific challenge!

Contact between humans and Neanderthals creates a relationship fraught with conflict, philosophical challenge, and threat to the existence of one species or the other-or both-but equally rich in boundless possibilities for cooperation and growth on many levels, from the practical to the esthetic to the scientific to the spiritual. In short, Robert J. Sawyner has done it again.

Hominids is the winner of the 2003 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

*** The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga [obs20, issybird, GA Russell]
Amazon Ca / Amazon US / Audible / Kobo US

Spoiler:

This book was on Benioff's top-10 list and won the Booker. From Wikipedia:

The White Tiger is the debut novel by Indian author Aravind Adiga. It was first published in 2008 and won the 40th Man Booker Prize in the same year.[1] The novel provides a darkly humorous perspective of India’s class struggle in a globalized world as told through a retrospective narration from Balram Halwai, a village boy.
<snipped for plotty points>
...the novel examines issues of religion, caste, loyalty, corruption and poverty in India.

*** Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson [JSWolf, Dazrin, Luffy]
Amazon UK / Amazon US / eBooks.com / Google Play / Kobo UK / Kobo US / Overdrive / Sainsbury's

Spoiler:

In his most ambitious project to date, award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson utilizes years of research and cutting-edge science in the first of three novels that will chronicle the colonization of Mars.

For eons, sandstorms have swept the barren desolate landscape of the red planet. For centuries, Mars has beckoned to mankind to come and conquer its hostile climate. Now, in the year 2026, a group of one hundred colonists is about to fulfill that destiny.

John Boone, Maya Toitavna, Frank Chalmers, and Arkady Bogdanov lead a mission whose ultimate goal is the terraforming of Mars. For some, Mars will become a passion driving them to daring acts of courage and madness; for others it offers and opportunity to strip the planet of its riches. And for the genetic "alchemists, " Mars presents a chance to create a biomedical miracle, a breakthrough that could change all we know about life...and death.

The colonists place giant satellite mirrors in Martian orbit to reflect light to the planets surface. Black dust sprinkled on the polar caps will capture warmth and melt the ice. And massive tunnels, kilometers in depth, will be drilled into the Martian mantle to create stupendous vents of hot gases. Against this backdrop of epic upheaval, rivalries, loves, and friendships will form and fall to pieces--for there are those who will fight to the death to prevent Mars from ever being changed.

Brilliantly imagined, breathtaking in scope and ingenuity, Red Mars is an epic scientific saga, chronicling the next step in human evolution and creating a world in its entirety. Red Mars shows us a future, with both glory and tarnish, that awes with complexity and inspires with vision.

Red Mars won a Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (1994, 1997).

*** A Cold Day for Murder by Dana Stabenow [CRussel, Dazrin, WT Sharpe]
Amazon UK / Amazon US / Audible UK / Audible US / Kobo (US) / Stabenow.com

Spoiler:

This was an Edgar Award winner in 1992 as a paperback original, and a delightful read.

Originally Posted by Dana Stabenow:
It’s December in the Park, and a ranger is missing. It’s no great loss to the rest of the Park rats, they figure he’s stumbled into a snowbank and will re-emerge come breakup, just in time for the ground to thaw and them to bury him. But when the man sent to look for him also disappears, Kate Shugak, ex-investigator for the Anchorage D.A. and Park homesteader, is sent in search of them both.
First in the Kate Shugak series. Yes, this is the one that was lost for two years in my father’s garage and went on to win the Edgar award.

Originally Posted by Amazon:
Somewhere in the hinterlands of Alaska, among the millions of sprawling acres that comprise “The Park,” a young National Park Ranger has gone missing. When the detective sent after him also vanishes, the Anchorage DA’s department must turn to their reluctant former investigator, Kate Shugak. Shugak knows The Park because she’s of The Park, an Aleut who left her home village of Niniltna to pursue education, a career, and justice in an unjust world. Kate’s search for the missing men will take her from self-imposed exile back to a life she’d left behind, and face-to-face with people and problems she'd hoped never to confront again.

*** The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu [Dazrin, JSWolf, BenG]
Amazon Ca / Amazon UK / AmazonUS / B&N / Kobo / Overdrive

Spoiler:

The work was serialized in Science Fiction World in 2006, published as a book in 2008 and became one of the most popular science fiction novels in China. It received the Chinese Science Fiction Galaxy Award in 2006. A film adaptation of the same name is scheduled for release in July 2016.

An English translation by Ken Liu was published by Tor Books in 2014. It won the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel and was nominated for the 2014 Nebula Award for Best Novel.
Quote:
1967: Ye Wenjie witnesses Red Guards beat her father to death during China's Cultural Revolution. This singular event will shape not only the rest of her life but also the future of mankind.

Four decades later, Beijing police ask nanotech engineer Wang Miao to infiltrate a secretive cabal of scientists after a spate of inexplicable suicides. Wang's investigation will lead him to a mysterious online game and immerse him in a virtual world ruled by the intractable and unpredictable interaction of its three suns.

This is the Three-Body Problem and it is the key to everything: the key to the scientists' deaths, the key to a conspiracy that spans light-years and the key to the extinction-level threat humanity now faces.

*** Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlan and the Great Depression by Alan Brinkley [GA Russell, bfisher, issybird]
Amazon US / B&N nook / Kobo

Spoiler:

1983 winner of the National Book Award for History.

Will readers of today will see parallels between the politics of the '30s and the politics of this year's presidential race?

*** The Long Quiche Goodbye by Avery Aames [WT Sharpe, GA Russell, treadlightly]
Amazon Ca / Amazon UK / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Google Play / Kobo / Overdrive

Spoiler:

Winner of the 2010 Agatha Award for Best First Novel.

From Amazon:
Welcome to the grand opening of Fromagerie Bessette. Or as it's more commonly known by the residents of small-town Providence, Ohio-the Cheese Shop. Proprietor Charlotte Bessette has prepared a delightful sampling of bold Cabot Clothbound Cheddar, delicious tortes of Stilton and Mascarpone, and a taste of Sauvignon Blanc-but someone else has decided to make a little crime of passion the piece de resistance. Right outside the shop Charlotte finds a body, the victim stabbed to death with one of her prized olive-wood handled knives.

The nominations are now closed.

[Dazrin]

We have had some good but long books in this category the last few years.

Here are some links for ideas:
Agatha Awards - the best cozy mysteries
Edgar Awards - Mystery Writer's of America best mysteries
Hugo Awards - Novels, Novellas, Novellettes - Best science fiction according to the World Science Fiction Society
Man Booker Prize - All categories - Best books published in the UK each year
National Book Award - All categories - cover that "Something for Everyone" challenge,
Nebula Awards - Novels, Novellas, Novellettes - best science fiction according to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Or just browse the List of Literary Awards and find something from a genre or country (in English please) that interests you.

Here are the previous nomination threads in case you want to see what was nominated in the past:
June 2015 nominations
June 2014 nominations
June 2013 nominations

As always, visit the MR Book Club Selections List to see what was selected in the past and, for the last couple years, links to the nomination and vote threads.

[issybird]

This is a novel that's my on my radar for a couple of months, since it made David Benioff's (of Game of Thrones fame) Top-Ten list in a New York Times article. Several other books on the list were favorites of mine, so clearly I needed to pay attention to the rest. This novel also made the Guardian's Best 100 Novels of All Time list.

I'm going to nominate the first novel by Samuel Beckett, the Nobel Prize in Literature winner, Murphy. I've clipped a few quotes from the Guardian article:

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” Samuel Beckett’s entry into this series with his characteristically bleak, nihilistic humour, marks another milestone: the first appearance since Shakespeare of a writer who will innovate as brilliantly in theatre as much as in poetry and prose. Beckett, indeed, is one of the giants of 20th-century literature, in any language.

Murphy is an absurdist masterpiece, a first novel that emerged from a long literary apprenticeship, mainly conducted in post-first world war Paris. It was the first substantial work by a young man – Beckett was born on Good Friday, 13 April, 1906 in Foxrock, just south of Dublin – who had been experimenting for years with poetry and prose, partly influenced by James Joyce, for whom he also worked as an unconventional secretary.

Murphy is a showcase for Beckett’s uniquely comic voice, his command of absurdist narrative, and fascination with existential, mind-body issues of being and nothingness.

Kindle Kobo

[WT Sharpe]

I nominate Hominids (Neanderthal Parallax Book 1)[/B] by Robert J. Sawyer. Sawyer is a Canadian author and member of MobileRead. When it comes to the Hugos, Robert Sawyer must feel a bit like Leonardo DiCaprio does about the Academy Awards. He has been nominated for a Hugo eight times, but this is his only win. Small matter, because in addition he holds an honor shared by only eight writers in history: He has won all three of the world's top Science Fiction awards for best novel of the year: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He's also won the Polytechnic University of Catalonia's 6,000-euro Premio UPC de Ciencia Ficcion — the world's largest cash-prize for science fiction writing — three times; a feat unpresidented in the history of the award.

The fact that this author mentions MobileRead in the third book of his thought-provoking WWW series (WWW: Wonder) didn't influence me in the least.

From Amazon:

Robert Sawyer's SF novels are perennial nominees for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, or both. Clearly, he must be doing something right since each one has been something new and different. What they do have in common is imaginative originality, great stories, and unique scientific extrapolation. His latest is no exception. [NOTE: This is no longer his "latest" — Tom.]

Hominids is a strong, stand-alone SF novel, but it's also the first book of The Neanderthal Parallax, a trilogy that will examine two unique species of people. They are alien to each other, yet bound together by the never-ending quest for knowledge and, beneath their differences, a common humanity. We are one of those species, the other is the Neanderthals of a parallel world where they, not Homo sapiens, became the dominant intelligence. In that world, Neanderthal civilization has reached heights of culture and science comparable to our own, but is very different in history, society, and philosophy.

During a risky experiment deep in a mine in Canada, Ponter Boddit, a Neanderthal physicist, accidentally pierces the barrier between worlds and is transferred to our universe, where in the same mine another experiment is taking place. Hurt, but alive, he is almost immediately recognized as a Neanderthal, but only much later as a scientist. He is captured and studied, alone and bewildered, a stranger in a strange land. But Ponter is also befriended-by a doctor and a physicist who share his questing intelligence and boundless enthusiasm for the world's strangeness, and especially by geneticist Mary Vaughan, a lonely woman with whom he develops a special rapport.

Meanwhile, Ponter's partner, Adikor Huld, finds himself with a messy lab, a missing body, suspicious people all around, and an explosive murder trial that he can't possibly win because he has no idea what actually happened. Talk about a scientific challenge!

Contact between humans and Neanderthals creates a relationship fraught with conflict, philosophical challenge, and threat to the existence of one species or the other-or both-but equally rich in boundless possibilities for cooperation and growth on many levels, from the practical to the esthetic to the scientific to the spiritual. In short, Robert J. Sawyner has done it again.

Hominids is the winner of the 2003 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

• Amazon Ca
• Amazon US
• Barnes & Noble
• Kobo

[obs20]

How about The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.

[CRussel]

I'll second Hominids.

[issybird]

I'll second The White Tiger, which also was on Benioff's top-10 list and won the Booker.

[JSWolf]

Please lets not go for the old classics. This just defeats the purpose of interesting books to read.

[JSWolf]

I'd like to nominate Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. It's won a Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (1994, 1997).

In his most ambitious project to date, award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson utilizes years of research and cutting-edge science in the first of three novels that will chronicle the colonization of Mars.

For eons, sandstorms have swept the barren desolate landscape of the red planet. For centuries, Mars has beckoned to mankind to come and conquer its hostile climate. Now, in the year 2026, a group of one hundred colonists is about to fulfill that destiny.

John Boone, Maya Toitavna, Frank Chalmers, and Arkady Bogdanov lead a mission whose ultimate goal is the terraforming of Mars. For some, Mars will become a passion driving them to daring acts of courage and madness; for others it offers and opportunity to strip the planet of its riches. And for the genetic "alchemists, " Mars presents a chance to create a biomedical miracle, a breakthrough that could change all we know about life...and death.

The colonists place giant satellite mirrors in Martian orbit to reflect light to the planets surface. Black dust sprinkled on the polar caps will capture warmth and melt the ice. And massive tunnels, kilometers in depth, will be drilled into the Martian mantle to create stupendous vents of hot gases. Against this backdrop of epic upheaval, rivalries, loves, and friendships will form and fall to pieces--for there are those who will fight to the death to prevent Mars from ever being changed.

Brilliantly imagined, breathtaking in scope and ingenuity, Red Mars is an epic scientific saga, chronicling the next step in human evolution and creating a world in its entirety. Red Mars shows us a future, with both glory and tarnish, that awes with complexity and inspires with vision.

Overdrive: https://www.overdrive.com/media/38286/red-mars
Kobo UK: https://store.kobobooks.com/en-uk/ebook/red-mars
Kobo US: https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/ebook/red-mars-1
Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Red-Mars-Tri...words=red+mars
Amazon US: http://www.amazon.com/Red-Mars-Trilo...words=red+mars
Google Play Books US: https://play.google.com/store/books/...d=R8OTfyIAmdEC
eBooks.com: http://www.ebooks.com/191896/red-mar...n-kim-stanley/
Sainsbury's: http://www.sainsburysentertainment.c.../9780007401703

[issybird]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Please lets not go for the old classics. This just defeats the purpose of interesting books to read.

"Old classics" can pretty much define a subset of books that are always interesting or rewarding and most often both.

And sheesh, if you're talking about Beckett, I can go much older than that!

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by issybird

"Old classics" can pretty much define a subset of books that are always interesting or rewarding and most often both.

And sheesh, if you're talking about Beckett, I can go much older than that!

I'm not talking about Beckett. I'm just trying to head off what usually happens.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I'm not talking about Beckett. I'm just trying to head off what usually happens.

De gustibus non est disputandum, to go with something both old and classic.

I think it's safe to say that the intersection in our tastes is nil. But that doesn't mean that one of us is wrong and the other right. Just let it happen, is my advice to you. People will nominate what they like; it's not as if they'll see the error of their ways once they read your post.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by issybird

This is a novel that's my on my radar for a couple of months, since it made David Benioff's (of Game of Thrones fame) Top-Ten list in a New York Times article. Several other books on the list were favorites of mine, so clearly I needed to pay attention to the rest. This novel also made the Guardian's Best 100 Novels of All Time list.

I'm going to nominate the first novel by Samuel Beckett, the Nobel Prize in Literature winner, Murphy. I've clipped a few quotes from the Guardian article:

Kindle Kobo

OK, I'll bite. Seconded.

[CRussel]

I'm not nominating it, but here are some links for The White Tiger, since no has yet put any up.

Amazon.ca


Amazon.com

Audible

Kobo US