BookTrendSpy pick of the month · November 2026
Project Hail Mary
Why we picked it
A man wakes up on a spaceship with no memory of who he is, two dead crewmates beside him, and a long way from Earth. Piece by piece he remembers that he was a junior-high science teacher, that the Sun is dimming because of a microbe that feeds on starlight, and that this mission is humanity's last bet. Then he finds out he is not alone out there.
It is a survival story told through problem-solving: every chapter is a puzzle he has to think his way out of, with real physics and chemistry made easy to follow. What lifts it above clever is the friendship at its heart, which is funny, unlikely and genuinely moving. You don't need to like science fiction to enjoy it, and you don't need to have seen the 2026 film, though it is a good excuse to read the book first or again.
Worth knowing: a standalone book, no series to commit to. Some swearing, no graphic content; fine for most teenagers and up. The audiobook, read by Ray Porter, won Audiobook of the Year at the 2022 Audie Awards and is often recommended as the best way to experience it.
About the author
Before he was a bestselling novelist, Andy Weir gave his fiction away. He published The Martian a chapter at a time on his own website, and when readers asked for an easier way to read the whole thing, he put it on Kindle for 99 cents. It climbed into the Kindle bestsellers, an agent got in touch, Crown bought the rights, and the revised print edition entered the New York Times bestseller list in 2014. Ridley Scott's film with Matt Damon followed a year later. For self-published writers it is still the story people tell when they want proof that a book can find its readers first and a publisher second.
For most of his life, writing was the side job. Weir was born in 1972 in Davis, California, the son of a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory physicist and an electrical engineer, and he was already writing code for Sandia National Laboratories as a teenager. He left a computer-science degree at UC San Diego unfinished and spent years as a software developer, with Blizzard (where he worked on Warcraft II), AOL and Palm among his employers.
Project Hail Mary, his third novel after Artemis (2017), came out from Ballantine in May 2021. It took the Goodreads Choice and Dragon awards for science fiction and was shortlisted for the Hugo Award for best novel. The film, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller with Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, reached cinemas in March 2026 and earned about $80 million in North America on its first weekend, at that point the biggest opening of the year.
Sources
- Wikipedia: Andy Weir, checked 31 October 2026
- Wikipedia: Project Hail Mary, checked 31 October 2026
- Rotten Tomatoes: Weekend box office, Project Hail Mary, checked 31 October 2026