Ripe

Elspeth McGann, a Scottish psychologist, believes her patient Lester Rains is delusional when he claims to have lived for 2,000 years and to be part of an extraterrestrial team waiting on Earth for an alien harvest. When massive ships appear over Moscow and abduct 50,000 people in hours, McGann realizes Rains may be telling the truth and sets out to find him. In her search, McGann encounters a group already tracking the so-called farmers, led by Cassius C. Trenton, a former NSA analyst who has been in hiding since decoding a mysterious transmission sent from Earth into space years earlier. The message contained a single word: Ripe. With alien ships returning and some world leaders apparently complicit in their plans, McGann and Trenton must locate Rains and find a way to prevent an impending apocalypse. Their investigation leads them from Edinburgh to the White House, where they discover the harvest is only the beginning. Ripe won the 2023 San Francisco Book Festival Award for Science Fiction.