Bargain @ $1.99 in the US only from Houghton Mifflin Harcount's Mariner Books imprint (couponable/VIP discount eligible @ Kobo; should otherwise be the same price at other stores):
Peace on Earth by the late Polish author Stanisław Lem (
Wikipedia), an apparently somewhat satirical science fiction novel starring his Ijon Tichy character (
Wikipedia).
Ijon Tichy is the only human who knows for sure whether the self-programming robots on the moon are plotting a terrestrial invasion. But a highly focused ray severs his corpus collosum. Now his left brain can’t remember the secret and his uncooperative right brain won’t tell. Tichy struggles for control of the lost memory and of his own two warring sides. Translated by Elinor Ford with Michael Kandel.
Also @ $2.99 US (non-couponable)/$3.99 CAD (couponable, and one of the rare sale books they bother to make available to us nowadays) from Mariner:
Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn (
Wikipedia; author of the long-running Kitty Norville urban fantasies and also a recent Hugo Award finalist for a short story I rather liked), the 1st novel in her Bannerless Saga, which is apparently a murder mystery set in a future dystopia.
A mysterious murder in a dystopian future leads a novice investigator to question what she’s learned about the foundation of her population-controlled society.
Decades after economic and environmental collapse destroys much of civilization in the United States, the Coast Road region isn’t just surviving but thriving by some accounts, building something new on the ruins of what came before. A culture of population control has developed in which people, organized into households, must earn the children they bear by proving they can take care of them and are awarded symbolic banners to demonstrate this privilege. In the meantime, birth control is mandatory.
Enid of Haven is an Investigator, called on to mediate disputes and examine transgressions against the community. She’s young for the job and hasn't yet handled a serious case. Now, though, a suspicious death requires her attention. The victim was an outcast, but might someone have taken dislike a step further and murdered him?
In a world defined by the disasters that happened a century before, the past is always present. But this investigation may reveal the cracks in Enid’s world and make her question what she really stands for.