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by Meg Howrey
Station Eleven meets The Martian in this brilliantly inventive novel about three astronauts training for the first-ever mission to Mars, an experience that will push the boundary between real and unreal, test their relationships, and leave each of them - and their families - changed forever.
In an age of space exploration, we search to find ourselves.
In four years, aerospace giant Prime Space will put the first humans on Mars. Helen Kane, Yoshihiro Tanaka, and Sergei Kuznetsov must prove they're the crew for the historic voyage by spending seventeen months in the most realistic simulation ever created. Constantly observed by Prime Space's team of "Obbers," Helen, Yoshi, and Sergei must appear ever in control. But as their surreal pantomime progresses, each soon realizes that the complications of inner space are no less fraught than those of outer space. The borders between what is real and unreal begin to blur, and each astronaut is forced to confront demons past and present, even as they struggle to navigate their increasingly claustrophobic quarters - and each other.
Astonishingly imaginative, tenderly comedic, and unerringly wise, The Wanderers explores the differences between those who go and those who stay, telling a story about the desire behind all exploration: the longing for discovery and the great search to understand the human heart.
"Starred Review. Although the contours of a space drama may seem familiar to a 21st-century readership, Howrey, through the poetry of her writing and the richness of her characters, makes it all seem new. A lyrical and subtle space opera." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. With these believably fragile and idealistic characters at the helm, Howrey's insightful novel will take readers to a place where they too can 'lift their heads and wonder.'" - Publishers Weekly
"Combine this human-focused title with Andy Weir's technical masterpiece The Martian to give readers the most complete picture of Mars missions that they could glean from just two fictional works! This title has abundant crossover appeal to the sf, contemporary fiction, and even the older YA crowd." - Library Journal
"Evoking the authenticity of Neal Stephenson's Seveneves (2015) with the literary sensitivity of Ann Patchett, Howrey has made the mission-to-Mars motif an exquisite exploration of human space, inner and outer." - Booklist
"Howrey's exquisite novel demonstrates that the final frontier may not be space after all." - J. Ryan Stradal
"The Wanderers is a stealthily brilliant novel. A distinct, shimmering vision of who we are and where we think we want to go ... Meg Howrey delivers this vision in a prose that feels new, sui generis, its own necessary vehicle, with a kind of sleek precision that is at once simple, gorgeous, and profoundly moving." - Peter Nichols, national bestselling author of The Rocks and A Voyage for Madmen
"Elegant, thoughtful, gorgeously written. A meditation on solitude, connection, aspiration, imagination and reality, which builds effortlessly to moments of immense power and honesty. There are passages near the end of this book that I will never forget." - Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe and Sorry Please Thank You
"The Wanderers is a wonderful exploration of space, trust, and what it means to be a conscious creature, finely-tuned and funny from the first page to the last. I loved getting lost in Meg Howrey's off-kilter world of astronauts and their simulated fantasies. She's a writer with an amazing eye for freedom and confinement and the thin line that sometimes lies between the two." - Jonathan Lee, author of High Dive
This information about The Wanderers was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: David Zaugh
Meg Howrey is a former professional ballet dancer and actress. She is the author of the novels The Wanderers, The Cranes Dance, and Blind Sight, and a coauthor of the bestselling novel City of Dark Magic and of City of Lost Dreams, published under the pen name Magnus Flyte. Her nonfiction has appeared in Vogue and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
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