Brightness Reef cover art

Brightness Reef

The Uplift Trilogy, Book 1

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Thousands of incredible audiobooks and podcasts to take wherever you go.
Immerse yourself in a world of storytelling with the Plus Catalogue - unlimited listening to thousands of select audiobooks, podcasts and Audible Originals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Brightness Reef

By: David Brin
Narrated by: George K. Wilson
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Buy Now for £16.99

Buy Now for £16.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

 David Brin, the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of Sundiver, crafts Brightness Reef, a luminous gem of science-fiction literature.

Persecuted refugees from six separate alien races have migrated to the idyllic planet Jijo. And despite their incredible diversity, the inhabitants live together in blissful harmony. However, settlement on Jijo is illegal - and it's only a matter of time before the residents of this forbidden paradise are discovered by the galactic powers-that-be.

©1995 David Brin (P)2009 Recorded Books, LLC Adventure Fantasy Fiction First Contact Science Fiction Space Opera

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Sundiver cover art
The Practice Effect cover art
Earth cover art
Existence cover art
Star Hunter cover art
All Systems Red (Dramatized Adaptation) cover art
The Kaiju Preservation Society cover art
Revelation Space cover art
Amber Magic cover art
Stonewiser cover art
Gateway cover art
Children of Time cover art
Emergence cover art
New Spring cover art
Hyperion cover art
Breakthrough cover art

Critic reviews

"Immensely appealing, leaving readers hungry for more." ( Publishers Weekly)
All stars
Most relevant
Brightness Reef is not part two but is part one. my bad.

Whoops

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I have a problem following too many characters and alien types and what and who is what without visual cues. For mind like mine with limited attention span, this book would work better as a comic or a movie. Our a print book with an alien race glossary in the back. Maybe even a character register. The narration was fine, given the source material.

Too many

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is the first in this series I've paid for both in cringes and a credit, the narrator slows his voice to a crawl for certain characters and the main theme of the planets regressive religion is repeated so many times I skipped forward often, yet somehow missed absolutely nothing relevant to the story. 1 star, 10 hours left of the book and I've given up.

Repeats the same illogical sequences.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I rarely give bad reviews but I have to make an exception. I like Brin as a writer and I listen to a lot of audio books. I can usually get into a book even when the narration is not great. The narration here is impossible to listen to. Wilson has decided to read the alien voices, which make up most of the narration, with deliberately atonal intonation and random vocal emphasis. It may have seemed like a great idea at the time to convey alienness,, but after 20 minutes or so you lose total sense of what he is saying and the will to carry on. Just could not listen to it despite really wanting to hear this book. Shame. You have been warned.

The narration not the book

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Enjoyed some other uplift saga books but this one was a real struggle to finish. i listened to multiple chapters multiple times just to try to get the grips on what on earth (jojo) is going on. Even after finshing it... i coundn't tell you what happened any more precisely than some vague outline in 3 sentences. maybe it's a good paper book that becomes difficult in audio format because of the style of the language? maybe the narration itself? most likely both and more, but out of the hundreds of books I've listened to, i think only 2 were so hard to get through. not because awfully boring, just because it doesn't work in the format.
may try to find a paperback instead.

struggle to get through

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.