Another essential Butler novel. It's the first post-post apocalypse novel I can think of, because earth is wiped out in a nuclear conflagration, but the story starts after the final human survivors have been whisked away on a huge alien spaceship by a race which compulsively genetically merges itself with species it encounters. With humans the compulsion is particularly strong, it's sexually charged. They are at times lustful, loving, protective and dictatorial.

The echoes of slavery and colonisation are hard to escape here, as with all Butler's fiction. If you've read The Patternist series and Kindred, you will find familiar ideas from those books here.

Dawn showcases one of the greats of the genre at her finest, and I am relishing the prospect of the two sequels.