Enders Game

Ender is special. He is a Third - a third child in a world where most families are only allowed two, a third child with a special purpose. The world is doomed unless a leader is found who can attack alien armies already on the move across space. Ender, like his brother Peter and sister Valentine, is some kind of genius. Aged only six he is sent to Battle School and begins intensive training. Continually striving against his classmates, obsessively trialling new strategies for the 'games' that make up so much of his education, he learns rapidly. While Ender is being trained for battle, politicians are predicting wars between terrestrial countries if the invaders are repulsed. Peter and Valentine launch an offensive of their own by contributing articles to leading magazines and websites under false names. Gradually their opinions are adopted by leading thinkers and Peter becomes as powerful as he had all along intended. Ender and Valentine, however, need to escape both his and their own success. This is an absorbing novel, particularly in the sections detailing Ender's single-minded quest for improvement. The contrast between the narrow focus on Ender's training and the wider issues brought to life by Peter and Valentine is highly successful, and the climax of the book combines both strands in a tour-de-force of writing. The characterization - except that of the three children - is sketchy in the extreme, and the plot as a whole relies on considerable suspension of disbelief, but somehow neither of these things matters in comparison with the gripping story of Ender's game. (Kirkus UK)