The Three-Body Problem

The novel opens during China’s Cultural Revolution, when the astrophysicist Ye Wenjie sees her father beaten to death at a struggle session. A political outcast, she is recruited to Red Coast, a secret military initiative searching for extraterrestrial life, where she secretly broadcasts a message into space. It is the first book of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, in which Earth encounters an alien civilisation from a nearby system of three Sun-like stars. First serialised in 2006 and published as a book in 2008, it appeared in Ken Liu’s English translation in 2014.