For each date, we’ve chosen a book that was written by an author following the success of that author’s viral bestseller. As readers, many of us scan the Bestseller Lists to find a new, noteworthy book…and then forget to keep track of the author’s career.

Together, we’ll revisit some of these books and decide if we’ve stumbled on an overlooked gem, or if that author was simply a flash in the pan. Either way, we’ll all enjoy donuts, so there’s nothing to lose.

January’s book will be The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (author of Red Mars trilogy).

The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us.

Set in the near future, the novel follows the Ministry, established under the Paris Agreement, whose mission is to act as an advocate for the world’s future generations of citizens as if their rights are as valid as the present generation’s.  Many chapters are devoted to other (mostly anonymous) characters’ accounts of future events, as well as their ideas about ecology, economics, and other subjects.

With its emphasis on scientific accuracy and non-fiction descriptions of history and social science, the novel is classified as hard science fiction.