Stefen’s Bookclub – July

Sleeping Giants  by Sylvain Neuvel

This book has been on my radar for a while, long enough for a sequel to be out actually. It’s an epistolary novel, much like an earlier bookclub book Radiance, in that it is a collection of reports and interviews. It begins with a recollection. An eleven year old girl falls into a sinkhole in a forest and when rescuers shine a light down the hole they see that she is sitting in the palm of a huge disembodied metal hand. Years later the same girl now Dr Rose Franklin, sits in an interrogation room and answers questions about her work. The hand and what it means have been her life’s focus from the moment she fell onto it, and it has led her to digs all over the world. Now she’s being asked questions that start about her work and then move to areas that suggest that this interrogation may really be about something else entirely.