You want to know how good GNOMON by Nick Harkaway is? I hate him for it.

Imagine a highly-democratised total-surveillance state in the near future. I mean, extraordinarily fine-grained democratic action by and for the people, which also oversees an utterly transparent national surveillance operation. Refusing to participate will get you noticed. If you refuse an interview on the subject, your mind will be read – a process that is not only painless but also has health benefits!

And then someone dies under the process. An inspector is placed on the case to discover how such a rarity could happen. This involves taking the read into her own head, to relive the interviewee’s experience.

There’s something impossible in the read. There’s something impossible in the dead woman’s head.

This book has more than one book in it. It is an astonishing piece of construction, complex and witty and, frankly, evil.

It’s science fiction, but also historical fiction and social fiction and just plain odd fiction. It is a magnificent achievement. He’s never written a bad book, but this is the one that’ll see him mentioned in the same breath as William Gibson and David Mitchell (CLOUD ATLAS). Two names I evoke for very specific reasons.

This book seriously just destroyed me with joy.

GNOMON (UK) (US+)

(note originally written October 2017)