By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Narrated by: Sophie Aldred
Length: 14 hrs and 37 mins

Of all Tchaikovsky’s works, this may be the most demanding that I have read yet. Where Children of Time, Children of Ruin, and Children of Memory, and Alien Clay stretch outward into the grand expanse, Shroud turns inward. It imagines how life might endure, yet the vision here is cloistered–yea, even smothered within a vast world revealed only to those who dare walk its shrouded surface.

This is not horror, though it brushes against its borders. The intimacy of the world presses close; the light of your ship is devoured by the dark, until nothing remains but a suffocating closeness that conjures claustrophobia. And yet, in that consuming dark, life stirs. Out of silence, an echo arises, a sound that calls the reader toward understanding what cannot be seen: how easily we misjudge those around us, and how fragile our grasp of the unknown truly is.