If you loved The Passage, World War Z, The Martian or Interstellar: this is a must-read thriller for you. * * * 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

Sylvain Neuvel has a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago. He is an amateur robotics enthusiast and lifelong fan of all things science fiction. He is the author of two critically-acclaimed series: Themis Files novels: Sleeping Giants, Waking Gods and Only Human, and Take Them To the Stars: A History of What Comes Next, and Until the Last of Me. He lives in Montreal.