This is not my cuppa.  I like a traditionally-told story, preferably in third person.  I can enjoy a story that jumps around with POV or even chronologically.  But I rather like a linear story with a conflict and a resolution.  You do not get that with an Onyebuchi story.  This is a horse of a different color.  Onyebuchi plays with POV but never gives up clues as to whose it is.  He also plays with the timeline; again, with no clues when you are.  A central plot or a specific conflict is not in this story; nor is there any resolution.

The time is the 2050s and apparently Earth is pretty well knackered.  Anyone who has enough money has moved to orbital colonies leaving the Earth to the meek.  We see the point of view of a young man who left the colonies in an attempt to find something he could build himself, followed by his reluctant lover.  Another are the crews who pick through the rubble for stuff that the colonies still want.  You also get a touch of the 'common' people just trying to earn a living and live their lives; even keep a society together in the empty cities.  There is a brief piece of a Marshall hunting a fugitive.  I think there might have been one character who touched everyone in some way but I couldn't pick him or her out of a lineup.  This book would need an additional reading to make more sense of the story.

Onyebuchi is less involved with telling a specific story as he is in telling us about the downfall of society and how it affects certain people.  He makes much of racism which runs rampant through the book; but even there I had trouble discerning if the POV was a person of color or a white person.

It's the sort of book that challenges your brain - you have to really be paying attention.  You'd do best if you can devote just a few days/evenings to this book and read it quickly; before you start to forget who is who or when or where.  I'm pretty sure I'd get more out of it with a second reading close on the heels of the first.

It may be a new sort of "dangerous vision" for this generation.  ~~ Catherine Book

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