Product Description

"A NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENT . . . Russell shows herself to be a skillful storyteller who subtly and expertly builds suspense."
--USA Today

"AN EXPERIENCE NOT TO BE MISSED . . . If you have to send a group of people to a newly discovered planet to contact a totally unknown species, whom would you choose? How about four Jesuit priests, a young astronomer, a physician, her engineer husband, and a child prostitute-turned-computer-expert? That's who Mary Doria Russell sends in her new novel, The Sparrow. This motley combination of agnostics, true believers, and misfits becomes the first to explore the Alpha Centuri world of Rakhat with both enlightening and disastrous results. . . . Vivid and engaging . . . An incredible novel."
--Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"POWERFUL . . . Father Emilio Sandoz [is] the only survivor of a Jesuit mission to the planet Rakhat, 'a soul . . . looking for God.' We first meet him in Italy . . . sullen and bitter. . . . But he was not always this way, as we learn through flashbacks that tell the story of the ill-fated trip. . . . The Sparrow tackles a difficult subject with grace and intelligence."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"SMOOTH STORYTELLING AND GORGEOUS CHARACTERIZATION . . . Important novels leave deep cracks in our beliefs, our prejudices, and our blinders. The Sparrow is one of them."
--Entertainment Weekly

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6234 in Books
• Published on: 1997-09-08
• Released on: 1997-09-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Amazon.com Review
In 2019, humanity finally finds proof of extraterrestrial life when a listening post in Puerto Rico picks up exquisite singing from a planet which will come to be known as Rakhat. While United Nations diplomats endlessly debate a possible first contact mission, the Society of Jesus quietly organizes an eight-person scientific expedition of its own. What the Jesuits find is a world so beyond comprehension that it will lead them to question the meaning of being "human." When the lone survivor of the expedition, Emilio Sandoz, returns to Earth in 2059, he will try to explain what went wrong... Words like "provocative" and "compelling" will come to mind as you read this shocking novel about first contact with a race that creates music akin to both poetry and prayer.

From Publishers Weekly
An enigma wrapped inside a mystery sets up expectations that prove difficult to fulfill in Russell's first novel, which is about first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. The enigma is Father Emilio Sandoz, a Jesuit linguist whose messianic virtues hide his occasional doubt about his calling. The mystery is the climactic turn of events that has left him the sole survivor of a secret Jesuit expedition to the planet Rakhat and, upon his return, made him a disgrace to his faith. Suspense escalates as the narrative ping-pongs between the years 2016, when Sandoz begins assembling the team that first detects signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life, and 2060, when a Vatican inquest is convened to coax an explanation from the physically mutilated and emotionally devastated priest. A vibrant cast of characters who come to life through their intense scientific and philosophical debates help distract attention from the space-opera elements necessary to get them off the Earth. Russell brings her training as a paleoanthropologist to bear on descriptions of the Runa and Jana'ata, the two races on Rakhat whose differences are misunderstood by the Earthlings, but the aliens never come across as more than variations of primitive earthly cultures. The final revelation of the tragic human mistake that ends in Sandoz's degradation isn't the event for which readers have been set up. Much like the worlds it juxtaposes, this novel seems composed of two stories that fail to come together. BOMC, QPB and One Spirit Book Club selections.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
When readers meet Father Emilio Sandoz, he's a wreck, inside and out. His hands are maimed, his body bruised; he suffers from scurvy, anemia, and spiritual devastation. The year is 2059. Although Jesuit missionaries thrive on suffering, something particularly dire has happened to this skilled linguist. Four decades earlier, he proposed an expedition to discover the sentient beings whose strange yet beautiful music had been detected by radio telescope. As the only survivor of this spiritual odyssey to Alpha Centauri (the star system four light years from Earth), Sandoz was found dazed and filled with terror by rescuers who inferred that he had resorted to prostitution to stay alive. Returned to the Jesuit Order, Sandoz is forced to face truths about the godless alien societies on the planet Rakhat that he and his colleagues grew to know, love, and perish at the claws of. Miscommunications, misplaced trust, and tiny mistakes led to their downfall. The dense prose in this complex tale may at first seem off-putting, but hang on for the ride; it's riveting! Russell's first novel is also a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Jennifer Henderson

Customer Reviews

The Sparrow

this is the best book I have ever read. I had it on tape and hard cover. I just got it on CD. It has been my fovorite book for over a decade. The more I read it the more it makes me think and the more I see in it.

brillliant introspection in outer space
This book is a beautiful and haunting Sci-Fi meditation on the nature of God and faith. It uses an extraterrestrial plot line to brilliantly articulate the strengths and weaknesses of the human race. I consider myself an atheist, and find myself re-evaluating faith, religion and even the practice of theology and philosophy after reading this book.

Reading this book conferred on me a type of spiritual punch I imagine Arthur C Clarke's "Childhood's End" and CS Lewis' space trilogy must have had on readers when originally published. I consider this book the modern exponent of introspective Sci-Fi, possibly sharing that seat with Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake".

Long investment, no payoff.
Muddiness gives water the illusion of depth; complexity does the same for writing. But after wading around in it for an hour or two and never leaving the shallows, you're left disappointed.

At heart, this book is a mockery of Christianity, if that matters to you.

Russell can write in the sense of stringing words together well, but her basic recipe just doesn't satisfy. She gives plenty of conflict, but no resolution. How many different ways can you mix together a couple pounds of ambiguous Torah and Holocaust themes, and try to pass them off as a new dish? However, if you pretend you are reading this as a fictionalized anthropology case study, you might enjoy it.