[nesfa-reading-group] Book club recommendations (3)

[Liz P]

 The Body Scout
by Lincoln Michel (Goodreads Author)

Kobo has some problems. His cybernetics are a decade out of date, he's
got a pair of twin sister loan sharks knocking on his door, and his
work scouting for a baseball league run by pharmaceutical companies is
about to go belly-up. Things couldn't get much worse.

Then his childhood best friend-Monsanto Mets slugger J.J. Zunz-is
murdered at home plate.

Determined to find the killer, Kobo plunges into the dark corners and
glittering cloud condos of a world ravaged by climate change and
repeat pandemics, and where genetic editing and advanced drugs mean
you can have any body you want--as long as you can afford it. But even
among the philosophical Neanderthals, zootech weapons, and genetically
modified CEOs, there's a curveball he never could have called.
"a perfect balance of cyberpunk noir, futuristic sci-fi, and easy,
wonderful readability."

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An Absolutely Remarkable Thing: A Novel Audible Logo Audible Audiobook
– Unabridged
Hank Green

The Carls just appeared.

Roaming through New York City at three AM, twenty-three-year-old April
May stumbles across a giant sculpture. Delighted by its appearance and
craftsmanship—like a ten-foot-tall Transformer wearing a suit of
samurai armor—April and her best friend, Andy, make a video with it,
which Andy uploads to YouTube. The next day, April wakes up to a viral
video and a new life. News quickly spreads that there are Carls in
dozens of cities around the world—from Beijing to Buenos Aires—and
April, as their first documentarian, finds herself at the center of an
intense international media spotlight.

Seizing the opportunity to make her mark on the world, April now has
to deal with the consequences her new particular brand of fame has on
her relationships, her safety, and her own identity. And all eyes are
on April to figure out not just what the Carls are, but what they want
from us.


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Walk the Vanished Earth
by Erin Swan (Goodreads Author)

In the tradition of Station Eleven, Severance and The Dog Stars, a
beautifully written and emotionally stirring dystopian novel about how
our dreams of the future may shift as our environment changes rapidly,
even as the earth continues to spin.

The year is 1873, and a bison hunter named Samson travels the Kansas
plains, full of hope for his new country. The year is 1975, and an
adolescent girl named Bea walks those very same plains; pregnant,
mute, and raised in extreme seclusion, she lands in an institution,
where a well-meaning psychiatrist struggles to decipher the pictures
she draws of her past. The year is 2027 and, after a series of
devastating storms, a tenacious engineer named Paul has left behind
his banal suburban existence to build a floating city above the
drowned streets that were once New Orleans. There with his poet
daughter he rules over a society of dreamers and vagabonds who salvage
vintage dresses, ferment rotgut wine out of fruit, paint murals on the
ceiling of the Superdome, and try to write the story of their
existence. The year is 2073, and Moon has heard only stories of the
blue planet--Earth, as they once called it, now succumbed entirely to
water. Now that Moon has come of age, she could become a mother if she
wanted to-if only she understood what a mother is. Alone on Mars with
her two alien uncles, she must decide whether to continue her family
line and repopulate humanity on a new planet.
A sweeping family epic, told over seven generations, as America
changes and so does its dream, Walk the Vanished Earth explores
ancestry, legacy, motherhood, the trauma we inherit, and the power of
connection in the face of our planet's imminent collapse.
This is a story about the end of the world--but it is also about the
beginning of something entirely new. Thoughtful, warm, and wildly
prescient, this work of bright imagination promises that, no matter
what the future looks like, there is always room for hope.
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