Plutoshine

by Lucy Kissick

Terraforming - the megascale-engineering of a planet's surface to one more Earth-like - is now commonplace across the Solar System, and Pluto's is set to be the most ambitious transformation yet. Four billion miles from the Sun and two hundred degrees below zero, what this worldlet needs is light and heat. Through captured asteroids and solar mirrors, humanity's finest scientists and engineers are set to deliver them.

What nobody factored in was a saboteur - but who, and why?

From the start, terraformer Lucian is intrigued by nine-year-old Nou, traumatised to muteness after a horrifying incident that shook the base and upended her family into chaos. If he could reach her, perhaps he could understand what happened that day - and what she knows about the secrets of Pluto.

For Nou possesses unspoken knowledge - something that could put a stop to the terraforming. But crippled by her fears, and unable to trust her family, there is no one she can talk to. Only through Lucian's gentle friendship does she start to rediscover her voice - and what she has to say will transform our sense of place in the Universe.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Space, Ebooks, Mystery Thriller, Mystery, Audiobook

408 pages, Hardcover

First published March 17, 2022

About the author

Lucy Kissick has a doctorate in planetary science from the University of Oxford, where she recreated ancient Martian lakes in the laboratory. She is now a scientist in nuclear research between the mountains and the sea of the English Lake District, and can usually be found in either.

Plutoshine is her debut novel and won the Bloomsbury Writers & Artists’ inaugural Working Class Writers’ Prize.