I finished this book last night and I am still not sure what I thought of it. I haven't read anything else by this author so have nothing to compare it to. I enjoyed the writing style, and the way future information was contained in current or past narratives. It could have been messy or difficult to follow but it wasn't. None of the characters were particularly like-able and I am not sure how Ms Mandel managed to string together the several, seemingly disassociated threads of the story in such a comprehensible way. Having worked in finance for forty years I thought the Ponzi scheme and it's aftershocks were well drawn. I think the title is misleading, although I love the cover; and the blurb on Goodreads gives away too much of the plot and leaves little to discover.

With thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review and e-ARC

"There are so many ways to haunt a person, or a life…"

Emily St John Mandel seems to have two particular talents (probably a lot more, but these two stand out to me). She has a remarkable way to tell a story by jumping around in time and yet having it all make sense. She seems to be able to put the pieces together so that the reveals from the past or future come at exactly the right point to avoid the reader being either frustrated or confused. It is a great skill, I think, to be able to write passages that the reader has known about for a while and yet are still exciting to read because the reader has been looking forward to getting the detail. Secondly, she doesn’t need many words to bring a character to life and she seems to get under the skin of her characters very quickly. Crucially, she takes her reader with her.

I have read all four previous novels by this author, but I think this is probably my favourite of the five. There is something about the writing in this book that makes it more subtle, more mature, more insightful.

Plus, in this novel, there is the added excitement of discovering two characters from the author’s best known work (Station Eleven) making a re-appearance. It suggests that (like David Mitchell), Mandel is setting books in a self-contained universe. Except! Except for the fact that here one character imagines a world where Georgian flu was not contained but ran rampant round the world destroying civilisation. That, of course, is the pandemic that drive the plot in Station Eleven. So, we have the plot of one book being imagined as a possible "alternate reality" in this book and with characters bleeding over between the books.

But this idea of characters appearing in worlds where they might not be supposed to be is actually a key idea throughout this new novel.

We begin at the end as Vincent (unusual name for a girl) falls off a ship to her death. Then we skip back a couple of decades to meet Paul, an aspiring musician with a drug problem. After some bad tablets, he has an even more serious, if different, drug problem. Then the core of the novel is the story of the collapse of a Ponzi scheme in 2008 (we know the man at the centre of this as Jonathan Alkaitis, but the crime is modelled on Bernard L. Madoff's Ponzi scheme which collapsed at exactly this time).

We follow Vincent, Paul and Jonathan, along with a host of other characters, as their lives connect and influence each others, or as their actions impact on others. I don’t want to give the plot away - a huge part of the fun in reading this book is seeing how all the pieces gradually pull together and I would not want to spoil that. But one thing many of the characters do often is imagine "alternate realities", the way life might have been (as with the Georgian flu epidemic mentioned above) and, at times, "see" people who should not be where they are seen. Are these characters ghosts, are they just products of guilty consciences, are they visitors from an "alternate reality"? The novel never strays into science fiction or fantasy, but it also never seeks to particularly resolve that question: this, it seems, is an exercise for the reader. One way or another, our protagonists are haunted by lives they might have lived or by lives they lost somewhere along the way.

At the end of the novel, most of the pieces are in place. I find myself pleased rather than frustrated at any loose ends: I want to spend more time with these characters thinking about what happened to them. As with this author’s other books, the pieces don’t come at you in the order you expect. But, also as in this author’s other books, the pieces are clearly organised to come in a very clever and specific order and to be the right size and shape to fill exactly the hole you as a reader were waiting to be filled at that point. I have finished every one of Emily St John Mandel’s book full of admiration for the way she tells a story. It’s a wonderful approach to storytelling and here her writing seems to have moved up a gear, too, making this a thoroughly enjoyable book to read.

Unfortunately this book just wasn't for me. A US or Canadian audience would probably enjoy it more, I found the American terminology and grammar annoying and also the whole premise and super luxury of the story line annoying.