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A thrillingly told queer space opera about the wreckage of war, the family you find, and who you must become when every choice is stripped from you, Some Desperate Glory is Astounding Award Winner and Crawford Award Finalist Emily Tesh's highly anticipated debut novel.
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.
Hugo Awards, 2024
"World Fantasy Award winner Tesh jumps from quiet fantasy to ambitious sci-fi in her raw and action-packed full-length debut...The political theme of breaking away from fascist ideology pairs beautifully with smart sci-fi worldbuilding—which encompasses shadow engine technology and time slips—and queer coming of age. This riveting adventure deserves a space on shelves alongside genre titans like Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A monumental journey...An intriguing space opera and study of radicalization, indoctrination, and what happens when one breaks free in the most absolute way." —Library Journal (starred review)
"Bound to make waves as one of the best sf novels of 2023. Fans of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power will fall hard for this story .... [It's an] expansive story with an action-packed pace full of exciting battles and gut-wrenching twists." —Booklist (starred review)
"Some Desperate Glory is honest, unflinchingly so. This book will hurt you and you will say thank you. It has everything you'd want in a queer space opera―wit and imagination and adventure, all within a brilliantly constructed world with an 'unlikable' and wholly irresistible lead. Reading this feels like bearing witness to something revolutionary...It will change you for the better." —Olivie Blake, New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six
"Masterful, audacious storytelling. Relentless, unsentimental, a completely wild ride. I had a time. Talk about Mass Effect beating up Brave New World in a dark alley." —Tamsyn Muir, New York Times bestselling author of The Locked Tomb series
"A profoundly humane and brilliantly constructed space opera that will have you cheering, swearing, laughing, and ugly-crying. It's perfect." —Alix E. Harrow, New York Times bestselling author of The Once and Future Witches
This information about Some Desperate Glory was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Emily Tesh, winner of the Astounding Award and a Crawford Award finalist, is the author of the World Fantasy Award-winning Greenhollow Duology, which begins with the novella Silver in the Wood and concludes with Drowned Country. Some Desperate Glory is her first novel.
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