Bones Burnt Black Book

Cherryh's books can be hard to rate. This one for example. It's tech-heavy, frequently hard to understand, full of internalised angst and labyrinthine politics. Plus which I hadn't read the book before this one, which meant I was playing catch-up a lot of the time.

But ... the human stories inside all that stuff are gripping. That's why I keep reading her, even when it means not knowing what's going on half the time. She does space opera like no one else, with all the complex humanity and bitter divisions that dog our species no matter where we go.

In this particular novel, the story of the pilot who has lost touch with reality, and the friends who have been brought in to haul him back, while inter-planetary politics implode and the test program of a new ship unwinds around them, is deeply satisfying.