Finalist for the 2025 Locus Awards, Best Science Fiction Novel
Finalist for the 2025 Hugo Awards, Best Novel
Nominated for the 2025 Philip K. Dick Award

A thrilling, page-turning standalone adventure, set in the distant future, from master sci-fi author and Arthur C. Clarke Award winner Adrian Tchaikovsky.

The planet of Kiln is where the tyrannical Mandate keeps its prison colony, and for inmates the journey there is always a one-way trip. One such prisoner is Professor Arton Daghdev, xeno-ecologist and political dissident. Soon after arrival he discovers that Kiln has a secret. Humanity is not the first intelligent life to set foot there.

In the midst a ravenous, chaotic ecosystem are the ruins of a civilization, but who were the vanished builders and where did they go? If he can survive both the harsh rule of the camp commandant and the alien horrors of the world around him, then Arton has a chance at making a discovery that might just transform not only Kiln but distant Earth as well.