I have tried to read this several times I just cannot get even 10% into it. Harkaway is vomiting a thesaurus of real and imagined words - thank goodness for the dictionary function on a kindle. None of these words add up to a storyline worth wading through I am afraid. I am sending a 1 star rating but as i Didn't finish it I personally don't think it is worth that

There are so many ideas and stories within this door stop of a book, that any one of them could be it's own book. Instead we get them all, linked together here, in one amazing narrative. An all too believable, near future, completely monitored UK is the underlying concept, but so is identity, pre-emotive crime detection and correction. A death during what should be routine brain scanning has to be investigated, was it a regrettable accident, or was it murder? I love Nick Harkaway, every book is different, yet still so thought provoking and interesting

Gave up on this book after the first chapter. Not interested in the period the book was set.

The book apparently took 3 years to write and is something of a mind bending experience. Set decades into future Britain, amidst ubiquitous surveillance, the justice system now incorporates an interrogation of memories/thoughts direct from the brain using the tiniest metal tendrils.

Neith a professional interrogator, is required to investigate the death of Hunter, a cult writer that has cut herself off from all surveillance. When she enters the mind of the very articulate Hunter it is clear this is considered by her a violation and she wants to fight it. As she fights the invasion, Neith experiences weird memories and pseudo experiences of 4 others and Gnomon who is a sociopathic human intelligence from a distant future, falling backwards in time to conduct four assassinations. Neith has to try and determine what is happening and more importantly who lives or dies.

The writing is demanding and ambitious. It is sprawling and at times bewildering, with a lot of otiose paragraphs with little clear insight into their purpose. But the writing is designed to produce layer upon layer of reality, so that it is difficult to determine what is authentic and what is not. There is a lot of rich prose, a lot of words which I had never come across and so I referred to the dictionary rather a lot, which I don’t mind, but the amount of nonsensical wording, may prove too irritating for some.

Despite rambling, the pace is very speedy as you feel like thoughts and situations, whether real or not are flashing with a sense of rapidness. There is a will to keep up to discover some sense within the Borgesian puzzle box that Harkaus creates. Not for everyone but a psychedelic experience if you’re up for it!

Just couldn't finish it, managed 50% and had to give up. A wonderful concept marred by stodgy writing

Gnomon is an epic of a book. 700+ pages with 5-6 diverse layers set on top, within, and underneath each other. Harkaway uses a lot, I mean, a lot of occult elements, Greek mythology, symbols, and his own world in a world here and it's all dense and long and takes a long time to feel truly interconnected but somehow it worked and I finished not knowing really what happened (I didn't grasp it all, I think) but regretting nothing.

Another brilliant book from Nick Harkaway. He has wonderful imagination, weaving the myth of the journey into the underworld into an investigation into the death of a suspect in a dystopian futureworld.. A society has protected itself from crime by total supervision but the system has been subverted. The investigator solves the case by examining the mind of the suspect who had protected her secrets inside a web of dreams. When at last the truth emerges the investigator herself is exposed to temtation. The weave of myth and story occurs on several different levels. Its a complex and stimulating book which has you reaching for Wikipedia to make sure you understand what's going on.

Gnomon is written by Nick Harkaway and was published by Digital Cornerstone on 2 November 2017. Gnomon is set in the late 21 Century post Brexit Britain. Democracy is direct. Everyone votes on everything all the time, which certainly keeps them busy. The downside of this supposedly perfect perfect system is the constant surveillance: electronic surveillance which is total and omnipresent. AI - the Witness is all seeing and all knowing, is, of course, for the good of society! Even within this perfectly controlled yet participatory society there are dissenters, refuseniks who live off the grid and don't participate or conform to the restrictive societal norms. Such dissenters are subject to involuntarily interrogations using mind reading technology by the Witness police. One such dissenter is Diana Hunter, she has been cult novelist who lives in a house which is off the grid, no electronic signals and its own Faraday cage. She runs a lending library through a barter system. Unfortunately Diana dies whilst undergoing interrogation.

Witness investigator Mielikki Neith is sent to investigate Diana's death. She is a committed believer of the panopticon utopia of the System. When Neith plays back a recording of the interior she doesn't find Diana's thought but 4 different people's Minds. Helped by Regno Lonnrot, Neith has to put together the puzzles of all these minds. Diana has left her message within all these thoughts but will she find it in time? Who is trying to stop the investigation and as the secrets, puzzles and encryptions of the Gnomon are discovered who will survive?


As an ex politics student who despises Brexit and the culture or cultish nature that surrounds it I loved the premise of this book. The execution of it, however, wasn't up to my expectation and anticipation. It could have been condensed into a much shorter novel and not lost anything, in fact a cull of the repetitious, overly long explanations may well have improved the final draft. The book reads like a first draft, the ideas are there but in need of an edit. The book tries to be too "clever" and ends up being a convoluted and exhausting read. The rambling, repeated explanations and break always to the heroine looking back etc do not add anything to the novel which is a rambling read but instead detract from what could have been an excellent, concise novel, relevant to today.

I received this book via Netgalley and Cornerstone Digital in exchange for an honest review,

As with many other readers I found this a hard slog and constant interruptions to look up words that didn’t seem to add anything. Sorry this was not for me and couldn’t finish it

I struggled with this compared to Harkaway's earlier books like Angelmaker and the Gone-away world. His writing soars off on flights of fancy and wander around the central plot progression which makes for an interesting read - in this case initially interesting but less tied to the momentum of the plot leading me to lose interest and patience. Definitely an author to try given there are few genuinely interesting and challenging writers out there - I will certainly look for the next novel and read it.

Not for me. the style of writing and the setting of novel did not suit me. I struggled to understand the context from the first pages and could not keep reading..

Whilst I enjoyed the start of Gnomon and the use of so many words that are, regrettably, no longer in everyday use, I am sorry to say that those erudite words were not enthralling enough to keep me reading. The opening of the book was great and, although fantasy, it's too close to reality. [China is working hard to duplicate a similar dystopian world with today's technology.] However, for me, once the scenes were set, the story seemed to fall off a cliff and into a chasm that I failed to retrieve it from - so there it sits; its denouement forever obscured from me!

**I received an ARC of this book from Netgalley in return for my own personal and honest review**

I'm not entirely sure I understand this book. This is one of the slowest I have ever read a book and I was initially so excited by it. The concept of a distopian future is very relevant in this day and age. Questioning these things are so incredibly important, to understand even through literature, how things can go wrong. But this book was a slog. I just felt that the multiple layers that were added on top made it heavy and bulky to read. I was constantly having to look up words and google terms. I felt this was a self indulgent expose into a topic that was clearly of great interest to the author, but was bogged down in so much detail that it lost its appeal. I feel the book could have been a fraction of the size and still conveyed a similar story.

Don't get me wrong, will I be thinking about Gnomon for a while? Probably. I imagine I'll spend the next few days at least trying to understand what on Earth happened at the end. I feel this book has potential but it just didn't live up to my expectations.

My thanks to Net Galley for my advance copy of Gnomon in exchange for an honest review. This is a work of science/fantasy fiction with some strange concepts. The prose is rich and dense and there are many allusions and clues scattered all through the text. The structure is not all that straightforward, and I found myself struggling. There are over 700 pages in this novel and I did find my thoughts straying. I suspect that this will be a like it or loathe it novel. I stayed with it.

Sadly I was unable to read and review this book before it was archived. I am very sotrry to have missed it and thank you for the opportunity to read it. I have given it an average of three stars but will not be reviewing it on my blog.

The ambitious concept, the format and the structure don't immediately strike one as original, but sometimes it's what you do with an idea that is important and there's no reason why Nick Harkaway's Gnomon can't be better and more purposeful that some of the models it brings to mind.

In the case of Gnomon, the obvious comparisons are works by David Mitchell, Christopher Nolan and - almost inevitably these days when you are dealing with high concept science-fiction - Philip K Dick. Gnomon is made up of a number of interconnected stories, exotic in nature, covering cast distances of space and time in the manner of Mitchell's Ghostwritten or Cloud Atlas - and there's a little bit of the computer game world and Orpheus mythology of Mitchell's opera with Michel van der Aa, Sunken Garden. There's an element of Christopher Nolan's Inception in that those identities are overlaid, imported into the mind and 'lived' in a mental dream-state, adopting a persona from a scanned memory, and the line between the dream and the reality becomes more and more uncertain the deeper the dream goes.

Initially, at least, we are in a kind of Philip K Dick Minority Report-like UK, where the state governs and controls the population through the System and the Witness, having direct access to the minds of its citizens, and the ability thereby to intervene and correct flaws in health and personality, all of course in the best interests of its citizens to protect them from crime and danger. It's a perfection of justice and democracy and just as creepy as that concept suggests. A few people however resist such intrusion into their minds and freedoms, and one of them is Diana Hunter, an author celebrated for her notorious 'ghost novels' that are deeply subversive and have an occult-like power, but don't really seem to exist.

Witness officer Mielikki Neith gets more than she bargained for when she investigates the probe and memory upload that has eventually been forced upon Diana Hunter which has resulted in her death. Aside from the unusual structure of Hunter's mind, Neith is subsequently assailed by the narratives of several other individuals and lives out their recollection of their lives. Among them is a Greek banker Constantine Kyriakos who after surviving a shark attack finds himself able him to predict major movements in the financial markets; Athenais Karthagonensis, an alchemist in 4th century Carthage who has forged a Scroll known as the Quaerendo Invenietis, only to see her work made real; and Berihun Bekele, a visionary Ethiopian artist who helps design an intrusive video game that organically and intuitively extends itself to create an ideal new structure for the world to replace the one that is about to collapse.

If it were channelling Mitchell, Gnomon would be a testament to the power of stories, to the power of imagination to create, shape and transform the world, or in Nolan it would be a complex puzzle that hints at an underlying force connecting everything together; or in PKD it would be a paranoid philosophical investigation of human neutral pathways interacting with technology, blurring the lines of what makes us human and opening the way to a warning against a surveillance society. Nick Harkaway's novel not only ambitiously combines all those ideas into a (mostly) coherent whole that comes together impressively at the end, but he also manages to view it in the context of our own society today, specifically in relation to the ugly side of the UK that has been shown by Conservative policies, nationalism and Brexit.

Gnomon is a little bit of everything. It's science-fiction, a murder mystery investigation and a warning about how society is not just growing tolerant of fascism, but is showing an increasing propensity towards accepting it. The novel is also a post-modern self-reflexive questioning on the function of writing and its ability to stimulate the mind, expand beyond words on the page, on its escapist nature to insulate against the horrors of world while at the same time inform and speak out against them. As Berihun Bekele observes at one point "What possible virtue is there in painting, and most especially in painting inner vistas of futurity and madness, when madness is the common currency of everyone around?"

Swap 'painting' for 'writing' and you find some clue to the intentions of Gnomon as a very real and pertinent response to the function of not just a writer, but the individual in the face of an increasingly intolerant and right-wing society that we can recognise around us today and how we all have a duty to not only recognise it, but resist it. Gnomon is not just a clever puzzle to be worked out, although it is very clever and does have a plot that folds-in on itself. Running to 700 pages, it's a little bit sprawling, a little bit over-written in places, undoubtedly overreaching and over-ambitious to the point of near incomprehensibility in places, but it all does seem to come together and make sense, even if it's only to tell us that the world doesn't make sense any longer and we all need to do something about it.

I didn’t love this but still a 3 star review not as good as others from this author. A great concept but not as slick as I expected

A far too complicated set up to get into. I do enjoy science fiction in general but was unable to get into this

I couldn’t get into this - sorry but it’s not for me.

The premise of this book sounded fascinating & I really wanted to read it. I did struggle for about a quarter of it, but life's too short. I found I was constantly having to look up words I didn't know & that interrupted the flow ( that wasn't flowing very fast) I'm sure this is really well written. I wish I could have got into it but I'm going to have to admit defeat. Thanks to Netgalley & the publisher for letting me try!