Gnomon

A rather great set of interwoven story-lines marred by being too long and digressive. The writing style is spectacular and Harkaway has a huge vocabulary, (that he gleefully and constantly shows off). But the seemingly endless cleverness conversely ended up working against my enjoyment. In fairness, real life has been extremely busy lately and that impacted my ability to spend adequate time with this book, (it took me 15 days to read!). I may have rated this higher had I been better able to focus. Whatever the reason, as I reached the denouement I was feeling a bit exhausted and was thankful to finally finish.

That's not to say that other readers won't find this book brilliant. In many ways it is absolutely staggeringly brilliant. I simply found the nearly 700-page length to be a bigger container than needed to tell the story.