Ender’s Game

How it reads

Ender’s Game is science fiction (military science fiction, specifically), and its dominant mood is tense. The suspense is the kind you feel in your shoulders. It moves fast: plot-driven and hard to put down, the kind of book that carries you along even when you're tired.

It's set in several locations, in the future, told in the third person across several viewpoints. Its central concerns are war, coming of age and power and politics. In weight it sits in the middle: substantial without being heavy going.

It opens a series. The ending is bittersweet: it resolves, but at a price. At 324 pages it's an ordinary novel's length. It's a mega-bestseller — the book everyone seems to have read.