Ninth City Burning

For fans of Ender's Game, Red Rising, and The Hunger Games comes an explosive, epic science fiction debut...



Cities vanished, gone in flashes of world-shattering destruction. An alien race had come to make Earth theirs, bringing a power so far beyond human technology it seemed like magic. It was nearly the end of the world-until we learned to seize the power, and use it to fight back.



The war has raged for five centuries. For a cadet like Jax, one of the few who can harness the enemy's universe-altering force, that means growing up in an elite military academy, training for battle at the front-and hoping he is ready. For Naomi, young nomad roaming the wilds of a ruined Earth, it means a daily fight for survival against the savage raiders who threaten her caravan.



When a new attack looms, these two fledging warriors find their paths suddenly intertwined. Together with a gifted but reckless military commander, a factory worker drafted as cannon fodder, a wild and beautiful gunfighter, and a brilliant scientist with nothing to lose-they must find a way to turn back the coming invasion, or see their home finally and completely destroyed.

J. Patrick Black has worked as a bartender, a small-town lawyer, a home builder, and a costumed theme-park character, all while living a secret double life as a fiction writer. While fiction is now his profession, he still finds occasion to ply his other trades as well. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he likes to visit the ocean. Ninth City Burning is his first novel.

About J. Patrick Black