Sleeping Giants
Themis Files Book 1
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
**A must-read thriller for lovers of The Passage, World War Z, The Martian or Interstellar**
What happens when you make a discovery that changes everything?
Deadwood, USA. A girl sneaks out just before dark to ride her new bike. Suddenly, the ground disappears beneath her. Waking up at the bottom of a deep pit, she sees an emergency rescue team above her. The people looking down see something far stranger...
"We always look forward. We never look back."
That girl grows up to be Dr. Rose Franklyn, a brilliant scientist and the leading world expert on what she discovered. An enormous, ornate hand made of an exceptionally rare metal, which predates all human civilisation on the continent.
"But this thing ... it's different. It challenges us. It rewrites history."
An object whose origins and purpose are perhaps the greatest mystery humanity has ever faced. Solving the secret of where it came from - and how many more parts may be out there - could change life as we know it.
"It dares us to question what we know about ourselves."
But what if we were meant to find it? And what happens when this vast, global puzzle is complete...?
"About everything."
* * *
'Bursts at the seams with big ideas. A sheer blast from start to finish. I haven't had this much fun reading in ages' Blake Crouch, author of the Wayward Pines trilogy
'A stellar debut which masterfully blends sci-fi, political thriller and apocalyptic fiction. So much more than the sum of its parts - a page-turner of the highest order' Kirkus Reviews
'Reminiscent of The Martian and World War Z, this is a luminous conspiracy yarn that shoots for (and lands among) the stars' Pierce Brown, author of Red Rising
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
When Rose Franklin falls through a hole in the earth and into a giant hand, she sets in motion a decades-long quest to assemble a mysterious metal being. Canadian author Sylvain Neuvel’s cinematic debut is a pageturner, whisking us around a world that grows increasingly unstable with each newly unearthed robot part. The plot revolves around several key characters, including grownup Rose (now a physicist spearheading the project), a pilot learning to control the machine and a French-Canadian linguist deciphering its glyphs. Neuvel’s choice to tell the story through interviews and journal entries collected by a cloak-and-dagger figure ups the suspense and leaves us wondering what comes next in the Themis Files series.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This fascinating first novel is told mostly through conversations between an unnamed interviewer and the book's other characters, along with newspaper articles, government memos, and various characters' journal entries. When Dr. Rose Franklin was a little girl, she made a startling discovery in the woods near her home: the gigantic hand of a robot that appeared to be of alien manufacture. Now that she has grown up and become a prominent scientist, she has, perhaps by coincidence, been put in charge of secretly recovering other parts of the robot, which have apparently been hidden around the world for thousands of years, and returning the behemoth to working order. When the robot's human pilots accidentally blow a hole in Denver, Colo., thus revealing the machine's existence, other nations demand access and tensions mount. Neuvel develops several interesting characters, particularly Franklin and cranky pilot Kara Resnik. Even the anonymous interviewer, by turns enigmatic and supportive, holds the reader's attention. Behind them looms the gigantic, inhuman figure of the robot. There are hints that it was placed on Earth to protect humankind, but from what? Far from being a clone of the Transformers, this intriguing tale is entirely worthy of an adult audience.
Customer Reviews
Brilliant book!
I’ll say it again. It’s brilliant! I don’t leave reviews but I had to for this one. Can’t wait to read the next two.
Unputdownable
Absolutely outstanding start to end. Witty, intelligent, mysterious and compelling. Well done! On to part 2...
Amazing
Amazing read couldn’t put it down