When he is interviewed by Colonel Graff, Fleet School hopeful Dabeet Ochoa discovers he has a mysterious connection to Fleet.

You can't step into the same river twice, but Card has gracefully dipped twice into the same inkwellAonce for Ender's Game and again for this stand-alone "parallel novel." The course readers will follow this time is of the superhuman child Bean. Raised on streets ruled by starving children's gangs, he was too weak, at age four, to hold peanuts in his hand, but ingenious enough to trick the other children into civilizing themselvesAand to keep himself...

In this sequel to Card's bestselling novel "Empire," President Averell Torrent launches America into a get-tough, this-world-is-our-empire foreign policy stance. When Captain Bartholomew "Cole" Coleman sees the danger Torrent poses to American democracy and the potential disasters involved in his foreign military adventures, he quickly runs afoul of Torrent and, while on the run, finds proof that Torrent orchestrated a presidential assassination.