The Story
A mission with no return trip.
Told in two threads — the present emergency in deep space, and the flashbacks that explain how it got there — the novel reconstructs a mission on the fly, one recovered memory at a time.
Waking Up Alone
No name, no memory, just a synthetic voice asking basic arithmetic. Grace has to relearn who he is from the wreckage of his own mind — and figure out why his crewmates never woke up at all.
The Astrophage Problem
Years earlier, a former biologist turned schoolteacher is pulled into a covert international effort to understand a microorganism that's quietly dimming the sun — and every other star nearby.
Not Alone Anymore
Trillions of miles from Earth, Grace discovers he isn't the only species with something to lose. What starts as two strangers solving the same equation becomes the book's real center of gravity.