And when Captain Candless asks Nailer why he's going to be searching for Nita, Nailer explains: People like Sloth.īut Nailer has this lever (read: the ability to shift out of self-preservation mode and help someone else), so when he and Pima are trying to decide whether to kill Nita and scavenge her ship, he empathizes with Nita's plight and thus saves her life.

Some people couldn't see any farther than themselves. Or maybe the lever hadn't been there after all. He'd been so desperate to get Sloth to care.īut he hadn't been able to find the lever. This is totally different from his dad and a few other characters in the novel. Guided by a moral compass he didn't think he had, Nailer consistently tries to do the right thing. Nailer and other characters think a lot about Nailer's motives for making the decisions he does throughout the novel. Nailer spends much of his time with his best friend Pima and Pima's mother Sadna, who function as his surrogate family.

Nailer's mom died an indeterminate amount of time ago, and his dad, a violent man who drinks and gets high all day, only grows more terrible. But when, by luck or by chance, he discovers an exquisite clipper ship beached during a recent hurricane, Nailer faces the most important decision of his life: Strip the ship for all it's worth or rescue its lone survivor, a beautiful and wealthy girl who could lead him to a better life.In this powerful novel, Hugo and Nebula Award winning author Paolo Bacigalupi delivers a fast-paced adventure set in the vivid and raw, uncertain future of his companion novels The Drowned Cities and Tool of War.'Suzanne Collins may have put dystopian literature on the YA map with The Hunger Games.but Bacigalupi is one of the genre's masters, employing inventively terrifying details in equally imaginative story lines.' -Los Angeles TimesA New York Times BestsellerA Michael L.Nailer is an adolescent ship breaker who works on light crew, crawling in the smallest places of old oil tankers to strip the ships for parts. Nailer, a teenage boy, works the light crew, scavenging for copper wiring just to make quota-and hopefully live to see another day. Grounded oil tankers are being broken down for parts by crews of young people. This thrilling bestseller and National Book Award Finalist is a gritty, high-stakes adventure of a teenage boy faced with conflicting loyalties, set in a dark future America devastated by the forces of climate change.In America's flooded Gulf Coast region, oil is scarce, but loyalty is scarcer.

Ship breaker novel