A century after the Martian war of independence, a group of kids are sent to Earth as delegates from Mars, but when they return home, they are caught between the two worlds, unable to reconcile the beauty and culture of Mars with their experiences on Earth in this spellbinding novel from Hugo Award&;winning author Hao Jingfang. This genre-bending novel is set on Earth in the wake of a second civil war&;not between two factions in one nation, but two factions in one solar system: Mars and Earth. In an attempt to repair increasing tensions, the colonies of Mars send a group of young people to live on Earth to help reconcile humanity. But the group finds itself with no real home, no friends, and fractured allegiances as they struggle to find a sense of community and identity, trapped between two worlds. Fans of Kazuo Ishiguro&;s Never Let Me Go and Naomi Alderman&;s The Power will fall in love with this novel about lost innocence, an uncertain future, and never feeling at home, no matter where you are in the universe. Translated by Ken Liu, bestselling author of The Paper Menagerie and translator of Cixin Liu&;s The Three-Body Problem, Vagabonds is the first novel from Hao Jingfang, the first Chinese woman to ever win the esteemed Hugo Award.
"Tedious and boring. It amazes me that i was even able to finish this monster of a book. It was 576 pages too long. Hardly anything happens but still the "plot" drags on and on endlessly, for ever and ever and a day. Reading this was extremely tiresome, but it wasn't outright bad and i guess that's why i persisted. I didn't hate it enough to ditch it, but at the same time, I just didn't care. I guess it would be better to have hated it just to feel something towards this waste of paper. I hate to be mean to a book but this was just plain forgettable and inconsecuential. I guess the writing was okay (again, not terrible but not remarkable either), but the characters were one dimensional, boring, and flat. The only thing that this book did well was portray the effects that traveling between completely different enviroments and culturas for a prolonged time can have on a person. So that's cool, I guess."