
As the party's extremists grow increasingly violent, things are further complicated by the arrival of yet another amygdaline, this one determined to fulfill a suicide pact with Ampersand. without a human chaperone, essentially classifying them as second-class citizens. Out of the turmoil rises the Third Party, advocating a Third Option, a "proposed law that would create an entirely new category of personhood" and severely limit the amygdalines' ability to function within the U.S. While the world's governments debate how many rights, if any, to extend to the amygdalines, unrest builds in the United States due to the lack of public information about the aliens. The situation with intelligent extraterrestrials on Earth grows ever more complex in bestseller Ellis's brilliantly considered follow-up to Axiom's End, which finds human Cora and alien amygdaline Ampersand navigating a political minefield. While asking the question of what constitutes a “person,” Ellis also examines what makes a monster.

With a voice completely her own, Lindsay Ellis deepens her realistic exploration of the reality of a planet faced with the presence of extraterrestrial intelligence, probing the essential questions of humanity and decency, and the boundaries of the human mind. Making this case is hard enough when the public doesn’t know what it’s dealing with-and it will only become harder when a mysterious flash illuminates the sky, marking the arrival of an agent of chaos that will light an already-unstable world on fire. Since Cora has no choice but to trust Kaveh, the two must work together to prove to a fearful world that intelligent, conscious beings should be considered persons, no matter how horrifying, powerful, or malicious they may seem. Despite this, Ampersand is still keen on keeping secrets, even from Cora, which backfires on them both when investigative journalist Kaveh Mazandarani, a close colleague of Cora’s unscrupulous estranged father, witnesses far more of Ampersand’s machinations than anyone was meant to see. How do you define “person” in the first place?Ĭora Sabino not only serves as the full-time communication intermediary between the alien entity Ampersand and his government chaperones but also shares a mysterious bond with him that is both painful and intimate in ways neither of them could have anticipated.

As the political climate grows more unstable, the world is forced to consider the ramifications of granting human rights to nonhuman persons. The human race is at a crossroads we know that we are not alone, but details about the alien presence on Earth are still being withheld from the public. Truth of the Divine is the latest alternate-history first-contact novel in the Noumena series from the instant New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times bestselling author Lindsay Ellis.
