Recommendations

Books Like Wayfarers

A crew of tunnelers takes a year-long job through dangerous space — and becomes a family along the way

Becky Chambers's The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet follows the crew of the Wayfarer, a small tunneling ship that creates wormholes through space. When they get a contract to build a tunnel to a politically volatile planet at the edge of the galaxy, they take on a new crew member — Rosemary Harper, who is trying to disappear — and spend a year traveling together through a universe full of other species, other politics, and other ways of being alive. The novel is less a plot-driven adventure than a character study of people who build a home together in a small metal ship. If the warmth, the found-family dynamics, the gentle ethics, and the sense of a richly inhabited universe gripped you, these eight picks go to the same place.