Sleeping Giants

An eleven-year-old girl falls into a chasm, only to be caught by a giant metal hand of unknown origin. Years later, the same girl is now a top physicist who has dedicated her life to solving the mystery of the giant hand. As it turns out, there are more pieces out there, and Dr. Rose Franklin is determined to find them and crack the riddle of this amazing discovery, one that will have both personal and global ramifications.

Told in journal entries and interview transcripts with an mysterious benefactor, Sleeping Giants is a wonderful mystery, dripping with intrigue and caked in sci-fi trappings. A story about interpersonal relationships on a global scale, Neuvel manages to capture our modern alarmist culture and balance it with the best and worst of humanity in a story that is all about the beautiful and terrible possibilities to be found lurking in any new scientific endeavor.

It’s a stunning debut, to be sure, one that asks so many hard questions and challenges both the reader and the characters to answer them, sometimes with unsettling results. I cannot wait to see where the story goes next. I suspect Neuvel has some remarkable sights to share with us.