Good Books - Thousand Words for Stranger

This week I've decided to share my favorite science fiction novel. I've always been a huge fan of the Star Wars universe so when I read this book I loved it. It isn't set in that universe but it has the same feel and genre to that of Star Wars. Gritty dirty space travel. The book is "A Thousand Words for Stranger" by Julie E. Czerneda:

As you can tell from my picture, this book is almost as well loved as my copy of "Watership Down". I honestly can't remember where I first acquired this book, but I have read it several times now.
The story is told through the eyes of one girl. The book starts with her waking up in an ally of a ship port on a strange planet. She doesn't know who she is, she doesn't even know what species she is, or how she got to where she is. All she can remember is that she needs to find "his" ship. And she doesn't even know who "he" is. After a bit of searching she finds a ship captain named Jason Morgan. She asks to join his crew but he travels alone so he directs her to another ship. But before she gets there she finds herself getting captured by space slavers when they discover what she is. Jason finds out what has happened and rescues her and allows her to stay on his ship until they reach the next space port.

Their adventure starts there. They are chased by many different creatures all trying to capture her. In the mean time she is trying to remember who she is and why she is wanted by so many. Jason calls her "Sira" and he thinks she might be one of The Clan, a race of extremely strong telepathic humanoids. The question of why she ended up at his ship, which he doesn't think is coincidence, he continues to try to figure out throughout the book. His big secret is that he is one of the rare human telepathes that The Clan have been hunting down and killing. He has survived by living alone. His new goal is to protect both himself and Sira from whatever The Clan wants them for.
There is a great clean love story that develops between Jason and Sira. Neither one knows how things are going to end when she eventually gets her memories back. But they learn to trust one another completely.
I can't say enough good things about this book. For a science fiction romance it is very clean and very well written.

A few years back I was happy to discover the author had gone back to this universe and wrote two more sequels to Jason and Sira's story.

Sira has her memories back at the end of the first book and these two books answer the question of how Jason and her relationship goes on from there. "A Thousand Words for Stranger", can basically stand alone but if you want to know the "what happened after" story the sequels are pretty good.