Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.

Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.

All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.

And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone.

Or does he?

An irresistible interstellar adventure as only Andy Weir could deliver, Project Hail Mary is a tale of discovery, speculation, and survival to rival The Martian—while taking us to places it never dreamed of going.

Book Type:

Sci-Fi Thriller

Review: Project Hail Mary

Andy Weir’s PROJECT HAIL MARY sends a science teacher to space in a last-ditch effort to save humanity.

The sun is losing luminosity at an exponential rate—something seems to be siphoning its power alarmingly fast. It’s clear whatever is happening is affecting surrounding stars, all but one—Tau Ceti.

The world’s best minds gather to problem solve, but without answers and with the extinction of humankind looming, a crew agrees to a suicide mission to figure things out.

Ryland Grace was once a well-known molecular biologist, but a controversial paper (and its resulting fallout) pulled him out of academia. Now, as a junior-high-school teacher, he somehow gets tapped to participate in a global taskforce to figure out what’s going on with the sun.

Fast forward some time and Grace wakes up in space—the sole survivor of a mission he can’t seem to recall. But as murky memories begin to return, he realizes the impossible task before him. Light years away and alone, Ryland Grace is humanity’s last chance at survival and time is running out.

As with all of Weir’s novels, PROJECT HAIL MARY is relentlessly propulsive, rife with tension and problem solving. Grace is very much a reluctant hero, and his coming to terms with his role in the mission, as well as his friendship with an unlikely ally, are the main charms of this must-read apocalyptic sci-fi thriller. Non-stop twists (problems) kept me turning the pages, really clamoring to see what would happen next. I love the science, I love the very real relationship dynamics, I love the vulnerability of Grace, and I love that I couldn’t put it down.

It’s an emotional, edge-of-your-seat interstellar race against time and it’s fantastic.

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