Speaker for the Dead

Three thousand years have passed since the war that made Ender Wiggin famous and then infamous, and relativistic travel has left him a young man in a galaxy that remembers him as a monster. He has spent those centuries as a Speaker for the Dead, called to tell the truth about a life to those who survived it. On the colony world of Lusitania, humanity has met a second intelligent species: the pequeninos, forest-dwelling and courteous, studied at arm's length under laws designed to prevent cultural contamination. Two xenologists have now died at pequenino hands, in ways that read as ritual torture, and the colony's Catholic administration would prefer not to look closely. Ender comes to speak for the dead and finds a family shattered by decades of secrets, a biologist who has been lying to everyone about the plague that shapes all life on the planet, and a species whose behaviour makes perfect sense once one is willing to abandon every assumption about what a person is. Card's sequel abandons military science fiction almost entirely for something slower and stranger: a novel about understanding as the only real alternative to destruction.