The Ninth Metal

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(Run Time: approx. 10.25 hours)

IT BEGAN WITH A COMET…

At first, people gazed in wonder at the radiant tear in the sky. A year later, the celestial marvel became a planetary crisis when Earth spun through the comet's debris field and the sky rained fire.

The town of Northfall, Minnesota will never be the same. Meteors cratered hardwood forests and annihilated homes, and among the wreckage a new metal was discovered. This omnimetal has properties that make it world-changing as an energy source… and a weapon.

John Frontier — the troubled scion of an iron-ore dynasty in Northfall — returns for his sister's wedding to find his family embroiled in a cutthroat war to control mineral rights and mining operations. His father rightly suspects foreign leaders and competing corporations of sabotage, but the greatest threat to his legacy might be the US government. Physicist Victoria Lennon was recruited by the Department of Defense to research omnimetal, but she finds herself trapped in a laboratory of nightmares. And across town, a rookie cop is investigating a murder that puts her own life in the crosshairs. She will have to compromise her moral code to bring justice to this now lawless community.

In this gut-punch of a novel, the first in his Comet Cycle, Ben Percy lays bare how a modern-day goldrush has turned the middle of nowhere into the center of everything, and how one family — the Frontiers — hopes to control it all.

Benjamin PercyBenjamin Percy (Author) is the author of seven novels, the most recent among them The Sky Vault (William Morrow, 2023). He is also the author of The Unfamiliar Garden (Mariner Books/William Morrow, 2022), The Ninth Metal (Mariner Books, 2021), The Dead Lands (Grand Central/Hachette, 2015), Red Moon (Grand Central/Hachette, 2013) and The Wilding (Graywolf Press, 2010), as well as three books of short stories, Suicide Woods (Graywolf Press, 2019), Refresh, Refresh (Graywolf Press, 2007) and The Language of Elk (Grand Central/Hachette, 2012; Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2006).

His craft book — Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction — was published by Graywolf Press in 2016 and is now widely taught in creative writing classrooms.

Percy also has numerous credits and awards in film , TV, and podcasts.

Julia WhelanJulia Whelan (Narrator) Dubbed "The Adele of Audiobooks" by The New Yorker, Julia Whelan is an author, screenwriter, lifelong actor, and acclaimed audiobook narrator of over 600 titles. Her performance of her own debut novel, the international bestseller My Oxford Year (coming soon to Netflix), garnered a Society of Voice Arts award. Her 2022 novel, Thank You For Listening, was a Best-of-the-Year pick at Amazon, Audible, and NPR as well as a Goodreads Choice Award nominee and winner of the Golden Poppy. She is the founder of Audiobrary, a new audio publishing company and app, and her latest books – the 8-part romance audio series Casanova LLC and the annotated Victorian poetry anthology The Poetry Of My Oxford Year – debuted exclusively on Audiobrary. She is also a Grammy-nominated audiobook director, a former writing tutor, a half-decent amateur baker, and a certified tea sommelier. jmwhelan.com

"[In The Ninth Metal] debris from a comet drops a fabulously valuable new metal on Northfall, MN, turning it into a bloody, brawling boom-town. Great characters, fine writing, totally engrossing." — Stephen King

"Take one part dystopia, one part sci-fi, two parts apocalypse, then ride them roughshod through a bleak and bloody western, and it still wouldn't get close to what Ben Percy does here, which is blow open the core of humanity's dark heart." — Marlon James, Booker Prize award-winning author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf

"Whether you choose to think of him as the Elmore Leonard of rural Minnesota or the Stephen King of Science Fiction, Ben Percy — with his extraordinary and unrelenting eye — dishes up humanity like some kind of otherworldly blue plate special, at once deeply familiar and wildly new." — Margaret Stohl, #1 New York Times best-selling author of the Caster Chronicles

"When Benjamin Percy publishes a novel, I have got to read that novel. The Ninth Metal continues his streak of thrilling, incisive genre bending goodness. It's a sci-fi novel, a crime novel and a super-hero novel, too. Audacious and intelligent and exactly what I was dying to read." — Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling