A radio telescope picks up singing from Alpha Centauri, and the Jesuits — who have been doing astronomy and first contact for four centuries — quietly fund and crew the first mission. Eight people go. One comes back, mutilated and disgraced, and the book alternates between the joy of the voyage out and the inquiry that is taking him apart afterward. Russell is an anthropologist, and the alien world is built as an anthropologist would build it, with two species in a relationship the humans read completely wrong. It’s a book about faith and what happens to it, and the reveal is one of the harder ones in science fiction, though I’m not sure it’s as hard as she thinks.
The Sparrow