I read this courtesy of the publisher and NetGalley. It’s out in October (sorry).

A more complete review of this will appear in Locus eventually, but: it’s brilliant.

I read Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet when it first came out, I think, and I bounced off it hard. Why? I do not remember. Not a jot. Probably I was in the wrong frame of mind – at least, I can only assume so; after reading this I wonder if actually I was too much in a ‘big space adventures’ mode.

Chambers does some clever narrative things across this novel. Firstly, the chapter sequencing: it starts with Chapter 1… but then all of a sudden you’re in Chapter 764, and no you didn’t skip a lot of pages. So there’s two parallel timeframes. Which means one of the big character questions is resolved very quickly, which means that you can get on with looking at the other questions: how do the characters get from here to there? What changed?

It would be easy to read this mostly as an almost domestic novel, focused on two people and their experiences; there are even recipes! But the reality is that Chambers is doing some really cool political stuff here. The reality of the initial planet’s colonisation, the way the two societies structure themselves, how difference is viewed… yeh, there’s a lot going on.

It’s really good.