Rating: WARTY!
This novel was written by the same guy who wrote Cloud Atlas. I read and favorably reviewed his Slade House back in October 2015, but this one I could not get into at all. it was bo-ring. I think part of the problem was the reader's voice. William Rycroft is not someone I can stand to listen to. His voice really grated and I could not take it seriously.
The blurb advises us that "A gallery attendant at the Hermitage. A young jazz buff in Tokyo. A crooked British lawyer in Hong Kong. A disc jockey in Manhattan. A physicist in Ireland. An elderly woman running a tea shack in rural China. A cult-controlled terrorist in Okinawa. A musician in London. A transmigrating spirit in Mongolia" and going to find their lives intertwined. I should have stopped right there. I listened in horror to the first of these, and not for the reason you might think.
This terrorist had just unleashed a bio-weapon or gas attack (I forget which) and was in hiding, and that's exactly how interesting it was: nothing happened. Literally nothing. It was first person, too, and this moron was a whiny-assed little snot who constantly spawned venomous thoughts over every-single-person-he-encountered. It was tedious to listen to. That was the horror of it. if we had followed him as he unleashed his attack that would have been something at least, but this crap? I started skipping tracks after the first two or three, and ended up skipping all the way to disk two, which featured the second character in the blurb list. He was as tedious as the first: another self-centered first person story about events that were so mundane I don't even notice them in my life, yet this jerk was going on and on about them as though they carried Earth-shattering import.
I said "No!" and returned this to the library on my way home, the same day I'd begun listening to it in the car. Ick! No more! I cannot recommend this based on what little I could stand of it. Life's too short to allow a train of whining people to blow through my station, even if they are fictional.
