House of Suns

Due to spending lots of time on trains the last two weekends I've finished the current book I've been reading, House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds. I had a hard time getting started with this book. Alastair Reynolds comes up with some incredibly outlandish concepts for his books but this one is probably the most strange (so far). Add to that his tendency to use odd forms of writing, this one all being told from a first-person perspective but swapping between characters between each chapter, who are all clones of the same person. All this is a lot to get your head around at the beginning of a book. There were a couple of points early on when I nearly gave up. I'd been disappointed by the end of the last book I'd read of his (Absolution Gap) and this was his chance to redeem himself, which he nearly didn't. In the end I'm glad I carried on. It probably took till about half way through but eventually I was hooked and needed to know what was going to happen next. Towards the end as the pace picked up I was a little worried I was going to be let down by a quick resolution again, but luckily that turned out not to be the case and I was satisfied. Although it was nothing like a I expected it to be, but that's usually the case with writers like Reynolds. If you've read and enjoyed any of his other books then you'll probably like this too, however my personal favorite of his still stands as Chasm City.