"Bacigalupi’s novel The Windup Girl not only won the Hugo, but also the Nebula, Campbell and Locus Awards, the SF equivalent of winning the Triple Crown, plus was named one of the top ten books of last year by Time, Publishers Weekly and the Library Journal." - The Chicago Center for Literature and Photography In America’s Gulf Coast region, where grounded oil tankers are being broken down for parts, Nailer, a teenage boy, works the light crew, scavenging for copper wiring just to make quota—and hopefully live to see another day.
Emma Watson, a brilliant research physician, has been training for the mission of a lifetime: to study living beings in space. Jack McCallum, Emma's estranged husband, has shared her dream of space travel, but a medical condition has grounded and embittered him. He must watch from the sidelines as his wife prepares for her first mission to the International Space Station.
When a woman is mistakenly assassinated by a sniper from a white supremacist militia, her death brings together her FBI agent fiancee and her journalist lover, John Menden. The two team up to exact revenge by destroying the militia group, known as the Freedom Ring, with Menden infiltrating the group's Liberty Ridge compound. When he falls in love with the commander's daughter the plot becomes tautly complicated. In a scenario grounded in events on the right-wing fringes of U.S. society, Parker engineers a grandly violent climax to assuage all Menden's macho hatred.
