Some Desperate Glory
Instant National Bestseller and International Bestseller!
Hugo Award Winner for Best Novel!
Arthur C. Clarke Award Finalist!
Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction Finalist!
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 Emily Tesh’s explosive debut novel.
"Some Desperate Glory surprised me at every turn. At once a space thriller, a tale of deprogramming, and a missive on identity and meaning, the result is a vitally refreshing addition to the SFF genre. This book has earned a permanent place on my favorites shelf."—V. E. Schwab
"Masterful, audacious storytelling. Relentless, unsentimental, a completely wild ride."—Tamsyn Muir
"This is the sort of debut novel every novelist hopes to write."—John Scalzi
"Deserves a space on shelves alongside Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
National Bestseller | Sunday Times Bestseller | An Indie Next Pick | A LibraryReads Pick | a Goodreads Choice Finalist | With three starred reviews!
A Best Of Pick for The Guardian | GoodReads | Publishers Weekly | Powell's | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Audible | Gizmodo | Book Riot | LitHub | Financial Times | Discover Sci-Fi | Locus | NPR | Library Journal
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.
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Community Reviews
The plot was fantastic—I love space and dystopia and people seeing through the dystopia for what it really is, and I love found family, which we got a lot more of in the second half of the novel. All the revelations just made me keep turning the page to find out more. It only took me so long to finish the book because I was also playing a lot of BG3 at the time lol. Some of the things that happened were things I did not expect but also totally worked, and I loved that. Every time I figured, "Okay, now X is going to happen," the book completely pivoted to Y, but it didn't feel contrived. The author just didn't follow a bunch of common tropes and I love her for it.
(Of note, I didn't understand some of the fake science, but that's fine, I just skimmed over some of those explanations and didn't feel like I lost anything.)
And then everything that happened in the last third of the book was perfect. The alternate universe, the Sparrows coming together, the way that Kyr faced off against the main dictator/cult leader, and the ending of the book itself. By the end of the book, we had gone on such a twisty turny journey that I didn't even recognize the beginning of the same novel.
Anyway, everyone keeps comparing this to the Locked Tomb series, so I should probably get on that...soon.
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