A Desolation Called Peace

The second book in Arkady Martine's Teixcalaan duology is a Hugo and Locus Award-winning space opera that follows four point-of-view characters as the empire faces a terrifying and baffling alien species on its frontier. Martine's prose is genuinely literary — dense with ideas about language, identity, and what it costs to communicate across an unbridgeable gap — and the first-contact premise gives those themes real weight. The honest caveats are significant for this site's audience: the pacing is very slow, prioritizing interior reflection over action, and the book contains adult themes including a central sapphic romance and the violence of war. Readers should also have the first book, A Memory Called Empire, under their belt before starting this one. For the right adult reader who can receive all of that, it is a remarkable achievement.