Search - Foreigner: A Novel of First Contact

I'm not a fan of C. J. Cherryh, but I have to admit I enjoyed this book. Well paced, aggressive action and doesn't have her usual annoying attempts to humanize her aliens. Human protagonist is totally lost and overwhelmed in a society that cares for his safety but completely fails to understand his emotional needs or social cues.

This is another of Cherryh's Alliance-Union Universe books.
In the first of a trilogy, (Foreigner, Invader, Inheritor), we find a planet that has never known another race until humans accidentally are stranded there, a race that does not understand the concept "love", but has more than a dozen words for the word "betrayal." In this book we find a man who is the sole contact between humans and the Atevi, and what happens to him when racial politics and human emotions collide.
A recommended read, but make sure you read this one FIRST if you read the trilogy.

C.J. Cherryh uses a clever approach to write a story about "otherness". She places her lead character in a situation in which he has no control, and no knowledge of events. He is kidnapped early in the novel and remains a hostage to circumstance through the entire story. Interesting, but also irritating as hell. There is no protagonist, no antagonist - just a lot of action to people who can do very little to affect their environment except experience it with flair. This method helped emphasize the alien and the human, and was an interesting way to reveal a story.

(In truth, I found it a bit boring.)

It had been nearly 5 centuries since the starship Phoenix, lost in space and desperately searching for the nearest G5 star, had encountered the planet of the Atevi. On this alien world, law was kept by the use of registered assassination, alliancews were defined by individual loyalties, not geographical borders, and war became inevitable once humans and one faction of Atevi established a working relationship. It was a war that humans had no chance of winning on this planet so many light-years from home. Now, nearly 200 years after that conflict, humanity has traded its advanced technology for peace and an island refuge that no Atevi will ever visit. Then the sole human the treaty allows into the Atevi society is marked for an assassin's bullet. the work of an isolated lunatic? The interests of a particular faction? Or the consequence of one human's fondness for a specieswhich has fourteen words for betrayal and ont a single word for love?
Cherryh has done it again---portrayed an alien viewpoint that is extremely not-human, but becomes, through empathy with the characters, something we readers enthusiastically wish to understand.