Winner of the John W. Campbell Award. A New York Times Notable Book. The Hefn did not come to Earth to conquer it. They came to recover their own, shipmates who had lived among humans for centuries, remembered only as figures from old folklore. What they found instead was a world in crisis, and a handful of ordinary people whose lives would never be the same again. The Ragged World weaves together the stories of a teacher confronting a student's strange encounter, a woman in the Yorkshire moors who stumbles into legend made real, and a young woman whose illness becomes the site of an alien intervention that changes everything. Spun through with a deep love for the natural world and a clear-eyed reckoning with what humanity has done to it, this is a first contact story unlike any other: intimate, literary, and unforgettable. Book I of the Holy Ground Trilogy, continuing in Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream and concluding in The Bird Shaman.