Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards..

In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race's next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew “Ender” Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program but didn't make the cut–young Ender is the Wiggin drafted to the orbiting Battle School for rigorous military training.

Ender's skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle Room, where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers Ender suffers greatly from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of the alien invaders. His psychological battles include loneliness, fear that he is becoming like the cruel brother he remembers, and fanning the flames of devotion to his beloved sister.

Is Ender the general Earth needs? But Ender is not the only result of the genetic experiments. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway for almost as long. Ender's two older siblings are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If, that is, the world survives.

Awards

Winner of the 2008 Margaret A. Edwards Award
Hugo Award Winner 1986, Best Novel
Nebula Award Winner 1985, Best Novel

Review

“Ender is special. He is a Third – a third child in a world where most families are only allowed two, a third child with a special purpose. The world is doomed unless a leader is found who can attack alien armies already on the move across space. Ender, like his brother Peter and sister Valentine, is some kind of genius. Aged only six he is sent to Battle School and begins intensive training. Continually striving against his classmates, obsessively trialling new strategies for the ‘games’ that make up so much of his education, he learns rapidly. While Ender is being trained for battle, politicians are predicting wars between terrestrial countries if the invaders are repulsed. Peter and Valentine launch an offensive of their own by contributing articles to leading magazines and websites under false names. Gradually their opinions are adopted by leading thinkers and Peter becomes as powerful as he had all along intended. Ender and Valentine, however, need to escape both his and their own success. This is an absorbing novel, particularly in the sections detailing Ender's single-minded quest for improvement. The contrast between the narrow focus on Ender's training and the wider issues brought to life by Peter and Valentine is highly successful, and the climax of the book combines both strands in a tour-de-force of writing. The characterization – except that of the three children – is sketchy in the extreme, and the plot as a whole relies on considerable suspension of disbelief, but somehow neither of these things matters in comparison with the gripping story of Ender's game.” (Kirkus UK)