The Drowned Cities

Set in a dark future America torn apart by endless civil war, Paolo Bacigalupi's young adult novel follows the orphans Mahlia and Mouse, who have fled the fighting in the Drowned Cities for the jungle beyond. Their fragile refuge breaks down when they come across Tool, a wounded half-man engineered as a war beast, who is being hunted by a band of soldiers bent on revenge. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers published it in April 2012 as a follow-up to his Ship Breaker.

500 Startups partner Marvin Liao named it in a Book-Talk interview, among the fiction and science fiction titles on his reading list.