Shroud: A gripping first contact story from Arthur C. Clarke Award winner Adrian Tchaikovsky

Read by Sophie Aldred (Doctor Who).

‘Thrilling, terrifying and fascinating’

Tim Peake, British ESA astronaut

They looked into darkness. The darkness looked back . . .

An utterly gripping story of survival and first contact on a hostile planet from Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Children of Time.

A commercial expedition to a distant star system discovers a pitch-black moon alive with radio activity. Its high-gravity, high-pressure, zero-oxygen environment is deadly to human life, but ripe for exploitation. They named it Shroud.

Under no circumstances can a human survive Shroud’s inhospitable surface – but a catastrophic accident forces Juna Ceelander and Mai Ste Etienne to make an emergency landing in a barely adequate escape vehicle. Alone, and fighting for survival, the two women embark on a gruelling journey across land, sea and air in search of salvation.

But as they travel, Juna and Mai begin to understand Shroud’s unnerving alien species. It also begins to understand them. If they escape Shroud, they’ll somehow have to explain the impossible and translate the incredible. That is, if they make it back at all . . .

* * *

Praise for Shroud

‘Clever, vivid and terrifying . . . No one has an imagination like Adrian Tchaikovsky’ – Jim Al-Khalili, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s The Life Scientific

‘Crunchy, conceptual SF at its best’ – Richard Morgan, author of Altered Carbon

‘This is hard-edged science fiction that never loses its soul’ – Sue Burke, author of Semiosis

‘Makes Andy Weir's vision of Mars in The Martian look like a Caribbean beach resort’ – The Fantasy Hive

© 2025 Tor (Audiobook): 9781035013838

Release date

Audiobook: 27 February 2025