The Sparrow
Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, published in 1996, is one of the most devastating first-contact novels in modern science fiction and a book that uses the trappings of the genre to ask the oldest theological questions still worth asking. In 2019, the SETI program detects unmistakable music coming from Alpha Centauri. The Society of Jesus, which has been sending missionaries to unknown worlds for four hundred years, quietly mounts the first expedition. The crew is small: Father Emilio Sandoz, a brilliant linguist with a vocation that has cost him almost everything; an engineer; a doctor; a young couple in love; an aging pilot; and a fierce, foul-mouthed astronomer. Russell tells the story in two interleaved timelines. In one, the team prepares, departs, and meets the lovely, curious singers of Rakhat. In the other, Sandoz returns alone, mutilated and broken, and is forced to explain to Vatican investigators how a mission of joy and faith ended in horror. The Sparrow is patient, beautifully written, and full of warmth even as it walks toward catastrophe. It earned Russell the Arthur C. Clarke and James Tiptree Jr. awards and an enduring place beside Le Guin and Lem in the speculative canon.
What you might want to know about The Sparrow
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
In 2019, after a SETI signal is picked up from a planet around Alpha Centauri, the Society of Jesus quietly funds an eight-person mission led by Puerto Rican linguist Father Emilio Sandoz. Forty years later, Sandoz is the only survivor returned to Rome, and the Vatican wants to know what went wrong.
The Sparrow was written by Mary Doria Russell and published in 1996. It was Russell's debut novel. She has continued the world with one sequel, Children of God (1998).
Yes. The Sparrow won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the James Tiptree Jr. Award (now the Otherwise Award), and the BSFA Award. It is widely cited as one of the great religious-themed sci-fi novels of the 1990s.
The Sparrow is 428 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Sparrow takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
The Sparrow is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
The Sparrow is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
