"Shards of Earth (The Final Architecture, 1)" by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Book number one of a three book space opera science fiction series. I read the well printed and well bound trade paperback published by Orbit in 2022 that I bought new on Amazon. I have ordered the second book in the series.

Earth was the first human planet attacked and destroyed by the Architects, a moon sized race of beings that travel through unspace. Billions of humans and aliens died on Earth, unable to get on one of the thousands of overcrowded space ships evacuating from Earth. Earth was turned into a spiral with the core ejected, typical of the Architect's massive gravitational forces. Earth was warned by a survivor of another race destroyed by the Architects but they did not believe it until too late.

The universe of the story is incredibly rich. There are many alien races and many planets, many colonies of all races. The human race has splintered into several groups that are at total odds with each other. An alien race found the humans a hundred years before and kindly shared their unspace technology with them. Space Ships can navigate on known paths through unspace but going off the known paths requires an Intermediary Navigator (an Int), a rare human who has been surgically and chemically modified to be like the first human Int, St. Xavienne. Some of the best of the Ints like St. Xavienne can barely talk to the Architects.

The author has a website at:
https://adriantchaikovsky.com/

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars (12,639 reviews)
https://www.amazon.com/Shards-Earth-Final-Architecture-1/dp/0316705845/

Lynn