The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez (Del Rey, 2020)

★★★★☆

Millennia-spanning saga of a spaceship captain, the mysterious boy she grows to consider a son, and their crew of found family.

We open with Kaeda, a man on one of the galactic megacorp’s Resource Worlds. Kaeda lives a simple life farming dhuba in the fields, but every fifteen years, the offworlder ships come to collect the harvest. It’s during these visits that he meets Captain Nia Imani. For Nia, folding her ship through “Pocket Space,” time passes at a much slower rate—months to Kaeda’s decades. They share a brief but asymmetric romance. As time passes, and Kaeda ages but Nia remains youthful, we see how traces of Nia shape the rest of Kaeda’s life; we observe the ferociously human world he inhabits; and we learn about the deep costs of Pocket Space, the tragedies of lost time.

And then the second chapter begins.