The Light Brigade cover art

The Light Brigade

 Preview

Get 30 days of Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30-day free trial. Cancel monthly.
Try for £0.00
More purchase options
Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

About this listen

 NAMED BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AS A BEST BOOK OF 2019

“Passionately brutal, fierce, and furious in voice and pace. It’s a particularly cinematic experience of war, Full Metal Jacket meets Edge of Tomorrow.” —The New York Times

From the Hugo Award­­–winning author of The Stars Are Legion comes a science fiction thriller about a futuristic war during which soldiers are broken down into light in order to get them to the front lines on Mars.

They said the war would turn us into light.
I wanted to be counted among the heroes who gave us this better world.

The Light Brigade: it’s what soldiers fighting the war against Mars call the ones who come back…different. Grunts in the corporate corps get busted down into light to travel to and from interplanetary battlefronts. Everyone is changed by what the corps must do in order to break them down into light. Those who survive learn to stick to the mission brief—no matter what actually happens during combat.

Dietz, a fresh recruit in the infantry, begins to experience combat drops that don’t sync up with the platoon’s. And Dietz’s bad drops tell a story of the war that’s not at all what the corporate brass want the soldiers to think is going on.

Is Dietz really experiencing the war differently, or is it combat madness? Trying to untangle memory from mission brief and survive with sanity intact, Dietz is ready to become a hero—or maybe a villain; in war it’s hard to tell the difference. Military Science Fiction Space Opera Time Travel Fiction Solider War Interstellar

Critic reviews

"Narrator Cara Gee perfectly evokes the weary drawl of a battle-hardened soldier in this intricately constructed science fiction audiobook. The listener follows Dietz (first name unknown) through her mandatory training in the Corporate Corps. She learns to follow orders, to kill, and to cross the galaxy as a beam of light in order to fight the enemy that attacked her planet and destroyed her family. Gee's surface-level portrayal of Dietz seems flat and unemotional—but in a nuanced way that hints at deep anger and confusion. Gee gets more to chew on as the war progresses and Dietz becomes frightened about what's really going on. Jackie Sanders aces her small role as a corporate interrogator who tries to break Dietz."
All stars
Most relevant
Really good book fantastic sound quality and performance just wish the ending was less of ambiguous

Good but the ending left me wanting

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Absolutely loved this. The performances and production are great and the story is incredibly gripping. Will be reading more by Hurley - really pleased to have discovered such an excellent author!

Excellent

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
It's literally just another Hollywood movie about time travel. There is nothing novel, nothing unusual, just a mashup of events like any other time travel story, so it makes you think it may be interesting and have something new and fresh for you. But at the very last chapters you will find out that it's just more of the same.

Starts ok, ends horribly

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Cara Gee is outstanding in this.
Story was good and kept me interested. Really like the format of narrative story-telling set apart with the occasional "interview"-format. Lots of characters though, it was hard to keep track of some of the less prominent ones, but the ones important to the main character wasnt and I guess that's more important.

Very good

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Amazingly coherent, engrossing dystopian story that had me hooked from the start. Kameron Hurley is firing on all cylinders here.

mind bending time travel and gritty sci fi warfare

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews