Jack McDevitt won the Nebula Award for Best Novel for Seeker, and Stephen King's jacket line calling him the logical heir to Asimov and Clarke has followed him ever since. Moonfall is his one full-blooded disaster novel, and he brings the same discipline to it that he brings to the quiet books.

An interstellar comet — not a local one, a visitor from outside the solar system, moving far too fast to deflect — is discovered on a collision course with the Moon. There are days, not years. The American Vice President is on Moonbase for its dedication ceremony when the news breaks, along with a few hundred other people and no evacuation plan that works at that scale.

What follows is the impact, and then the part most novels skip: the debris. A shattered Moon does not stay conveniently in orbit, and the second half of the book is the Earth waiting to find out how much of its own sky is coming down. McDevitt keeps it tight on a handful of people — a shuttle pilot, an astronomer nobody believed, a politician who has to decide what to tell everyone — and the technical detail holds up because he did the arithmetic.

A standalone, unconnected to the Academy or Alex Benedict sequences.

The HarperPrism hardcover of 1998, first edition and first printing, ISBN 0-06-105036-9, with dust jacket. 464 pages. Confirmed as the trade first: the price is present on the jacket flap and the copyright page carries the full number line down to 1 — not a book club printing.

This is a former library copy, and it is described here as exactly that. It carries the usual library apparatus — a Monroe County Library spine label, pocket and stamp marks — and it is priced accordingly. What you are getting is a genuine first printing at a fraction of what a clean one costs. If you want a collector-grade first for display, this is not that book, and I would rather say so here than have you find out on arrival.

• Former library copy with the usual markings — spine label, stamps, and pocket residue
• Adhesive library label to the jacket spine
• Wear and rubbing to the jacket edges and corners; light fraying at the head and tail of the spine
• Age toning to the jacket and to the page edges
• Boards are clean and square; binding is tight and sound with no lean
• All pages present and fully readable, with no underlining or highlighting to the text
• Priced as an honest reading copy — please see all photos