On the Shelf Summer's Most Anticipated Thrillers If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. Using Hugo’s convict-turned-businessman Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert as touchstones, “Even the Darkest Night,” winner of Spain’s most prestigious literary prize, asks big questions about justice, revenge and whether literature can change …
Dystopias rarely interest the sci-fi author Ada Palmer. Palmer, who recently published the fourth and final book in her Terra Ignota series—a brilliant, ambitious, exhausting 25th-century epic—does not believe that the future will be bad or good. In place of the troubled present-day nation-state, Palmer imagines a system of seven Hives, groups of people spread across an effectively borderless world …
