Book cover of Nepenthe

Book description

“It will take the whole night at least,” he said, “to implant all my eggs.”The colony planet is a death trap. Only the tiniest fraction of humanity survives the gruesome rejection virus.

And then the aliens arrive.

The Nepenthe, too, seek a new home world, but discover instead a species…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Nepenthe as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

“What if?” That’s the question sci-fi and fantasy authors have been asking for over a hundred years. What if humanity was dying and aliens offered salvation, but only at a terrible price? That’s the question this book poses, and it does it so compellingly. The story’s set on a poisoned world, and in a dying race’s spaceship. There is no escape here except death. There are no familiar, comfortable spaces. Nowhere left to hide. There is only the smallest spark of hope: that the humans can somehow connect with the aliens who are “not squid” but absolutely not like us.…

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December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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