Children of Memory cover art

Children of Memory

Action-packed alien adventure from the winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award

Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends December 16, 2025 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.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Children of Memory

By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Narrated by: Mel Hudson
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends December 16, 2025 11:59pm GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Only £0.99 a month for the first 3 months. Pay £0.99 for the first 3 months, and £8.99/month thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Start my membership

About this listen

They dreamed of a new home. They woke to a nightmare.


From the award-winning master of sci-fi Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory is the unmissable follow-up space opera to the highly acclaimed Children of Time and Children of Ruin. Continue the journey with Children of Strife.

On Imir, Captain Holt founded a new colony on an empty world. In the process, he created hope and a new future for humanity. But, generations later, his descendants are struggling to survive.

As harvests worsen and equipment fails, strangers appear in a town where everyone knows their neighbour. Now the inexplicable lurks in the woods and the community fears that it's being observed – that they’re not alone.

They’d be right, as explorers from the stars have arrived in secret to help this lost outpost. Confident of their superior technology, and overseen by the all-knowing construct of Doctor Avrana Kern, they begin to study their long-lost cousins from Earth.

Yet the planet hides deeper mysteries. It seems the visitors aren’t the only watchers. And when the starfarers discover the scale of their mistake, it will be far too late to escape.

Children of Memory by Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author Adrian Tchaikovsky is a far-reaching space opera spanning generations, species and galaxies.

Praise for the series:

‘Entertaining, smart, surprising and unexpectedly human’ – Patrick Ness, author of A Monster Calls

‘Brilliant science fiction and far-out world-building’ – James McAvoy

‘A fabulous sense of scale that only someone as talented as Adrian Tchaikovsky can pull off’ – Peter F. Hamilton, author of Exodus: The Archimedes Engine

Adventure Fiction First Contact Hard Science Fiction Science Fiction Space Exploration Space Opera Technology Thriller

Listeners also enjoyed...

Empire in Black and Gold cover art
Cage of Souls cover art
Hyperion cover art
Elder Race cover art
Dogs of War cover art Artemis cover art
Guns of the Dawn cover art
Revelation Space cover art
Terra cover art
Delta-v cover art
Scythe cover art
Star Trek: Discovery: Desperate Hours Volume 1 cover art
Mars Nation: The Complete Trilogy cover art
Infinite cover art
The Thousand Earths cover art
Skyward Inn cover art

Critic reviews

One of the most interesting and accomplished writers in speculative fiction (Christopher Paolini, author of To Sleep in a Sea of Stars)
Brilliant science fiction and far-out world-building (James McAvoy on Children of Time)
Breathtaking scope and vision. Adrian Tchaikovsky is one of our finest writers (Gareth L. Powell, author of Embers of War, on Children of Ruin)
All underpinned by great ideas. And it is crisply modern - but with the sensibility of classic science fiction. Asimov or Clarke might have written this (Stephen Baxter, author of Time and Proxima, on Children of Ruin)
Children of Time is a joy from start to finish. Entertaining, smart, surprising and unexpectedly human. (Patrick Ness, author of A Monster Calls and the Chaos Walking series, on Children of Time)
All stars
Most relevant
I have to say I couldn't finish this book. I managed the first two but this was just so slow and stretched credulity so much that I gave up. The premise of the entire series is, of course, completely daft but that shouldn't necessarily matter. The reader just gets weary of the relentless use of the present tense and the realisation that you don't care about any of the characters.

A series that became tedious.

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

This series is quickly becoming not just my favourite sci-fi series but favourite ever.

Fantastic

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

As is usual, Adrian Tchaikovsky comes from a place deep in the the left field. His work is always thought provoking and imaginative. This book is no different. The story is teased out, with hints to the truth behind the immediate story, dropped like bread crumbs in a forest. It forces a wedge between preconceived assumptions of what it is to be considered a sentient, intelligent being.

At least that’s what I got from the story, there was a lot more but I think this about covers it 😬

although, it did leave me with that ache a really good book does. Bittersweet and melancholy.

Awesome, highly recommended

Another very enjoyable book by one of my favourite authors.

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

This is so well written. So mind-bending and intellectually demanding. Excellent story. This was so well written and thought provoking.

This one will stay in my mind

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

Spoiler alert!!!!!!!
First I thought the story was confusing and jumping back and forth.
However at the end it turns out that we experience that an AI simulation argues that the consciousness of a girl in a simulation they have encountered, is just as real as they and flesh and blood people and aliens are.
Long story short, they rescue the girl.

What is consciousness?

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

See more reviews