lost in translation still lost

Still Lost (Book 2 of 3)

Fourteen months after crash-landing in a Bristol garden, Commander Zyx-9 of the Felixtrian Space Exploration Agency has done something almost unprecedented: she's going back. Armed with proper equipment this time, an experimental translation device, and an eleven-page research application containing forty-seven footnotes, she has secured official permission to return to Earth for extended "xenological study." The science is the reason. Absolutely and entirely the science.

Gerald Fitch, meanwhile, has been quietly rebuilding his life — sleeping better, filling his notebook with present-tense things, tending the lavender along his front path. He had not exactly stopped looking for the space-cat who vanished from his kitchen. He had simply, sensibly, stopped expecting her back.

She's on his kitchen table when he comes down at seven-fifteen in the morning.

Still Lost picks up where the first book left off — and raises the stakes considerably. Now Zyx-9 can speak, and speaking turns out to be its own kind of complicated. There is more to navigate this time: a granddaughter with a familiar name, a world Zyx-9 understands far better than she did before, and a question between her and Gerald that neither of them has yet found the right words for. The translation device works perfectly. The feelings, as always, are harder to translate.

Warmer, funnier, and deeper than its predecessor, Still Lost is a story about what it means to choose somewhere — and someone — as your own, even when every sensible calculation says you shouldn't.