Jean le Flambeur is a thief. Broken out of prison by the agent of a god, he has to find his own hidden memories in a place where memory and privacy of mind and body can be absolute, or so its inhabitants think.
This is a fascinating book, with ideas coming thick and fast, right from the first page. When we meet le Flambeur for the first time, he’s an uploaded mind in a very real version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. From there, the pace doesn’t let up, with new words being thrown at you, and often not really explained, leaving the reader to work them out from context. It’s certainly a book that doesn’t patronise the reader and would reward rereading. So I’ll add it to my already extensive reread list (which never gets any shorter as I always have a stack of books to read for the first time!).
There’s obviously a lot of thought gone into the worldbuilding here and it’s drip-fed to us slowly throughout the book, with more to come in the sequel. And speaking of the sequel, although the main story of this book was completed within this novel, the overall story is to span a trilogy, and, indeed, hasn’t really been touched on in this volume. Le Flambeur was broken out of prison to carry out a theft for his liberator’s employer, but he can’t do that until he gets his memories back. This book is that story, with the theft itself barely mentioned. But despite that, I’m pretty hooked and will look forward to reading the rest of this trilogy.
