Mount Dragon

How it reads

Mount Dragon is science fiction (biotechnology thriller, 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 the wilderness or at sea, in the recent past, told in the third person across several viewpoints. Its central concerns are survival, power and politics and nature. In weight it's light and escapist — easy to fall into.

It stands alone, so there's nothing else you need to read first or after. The ending resolves happily. At 512 pages it's an ordinary novel's length. It's well known, the kind of book most keen readers have heard of.