Groundfall

About this book

The Perennial left the old system with ten thousand people, a spin gravity orchard, and a charter one sentence long: carry them, keep them kind, and plant the First Tree under the new sun. Nine generations later, the ship has kept every clause but the last. Ivy Talan, twenty six, tends the orchard ring her family has kept since departure, including the sealed case at its heart: an apple grown from true Earth seed, waiting two centuries for soil it was promised. Now the long deceleration is over and the world called Auren hangs in the viewports. Half the ship cannot wait to feel weather. Half cannot breathe when they look at all that up. Between them stand the Letter Room, where the departure generation left ten thousand sealed messages for arrivals they would never meet, and Ivy herself, raised by an orchard, terrified of the sky, and bound by a promise made by people two hundred years dead who knew exactly how afraid their descendants would be. A lyrical, humane novel about arrival as an act of courage.