A fantasy epic that's well-worth a read! As is typical with this genre, there is a lot of information and world-building packed in which can become a bit overwhelming at times but it comes with the territory. The ending really ties everything together.

The City of Last Chances is fantasy on a epic scale even though it all takes place within one city. The city of Ilmar is occupied by the Palleseens who have the perfect society and are committed to installing this across the world. Ilmar is inhabited by every sort of character you can imagine from refugees to students, the criminal underworld and priests (who are now illegal) and the city is on the brink of rebellion against the occupying forces.
The world building and characterisation in the novel were all brilliant. Each character and area of the city comes alive and is totally believable. I loved Yasnic, the only surviving priest of a God who has no followers and the students were fun too.
My main criticism is that there was just too much crammed into one book. There seemed to be too many points of view and too many settings so I never felt that I really got to grips with any of them. It’s as if the author put every idea that he had into this. The ending is great and things all come together but at times it felt like a bit of a slog getting there.
Thank you to Net Galley and the publishers, Head of Zeus for my ARC in exchange for my honest review.

City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a really good book as long as you take a few things in mind before you read it. For one, it is an epic fantasy -- full of a long list of characters and a setting that is vast even if it mainly takes place in a single city. For another, its magic, while quite present, takes a back seat to the totalitarian regime, rebellion, and a bit of worldbuilding mystery.

That being said, I followed the tale with some decent interest and appreciated the layered approach to the city's ongoing history.

Did always fall in love with the characters? No. But a few were consistently great.

I suppose my main concern or complaint is a purely personal one. I have always fallen absolutely in love with Adrian Tchaikovsky's SF and tend to find something a bit off about his Fantasy. I can't quite put my finger on it but it's still true. The places where I want exploration were shunted off track and while I DID like the social commentary on poverty and fascism and even the importance of language to frame the issues properly, I found myself wanting a different kind of book that has nothing to do with the quality of his writing.

I'm entirely certain that other people will get a lot more out of this novel than I did.

This was the first book I've read by Adrian Tchaikovsky, but it will not be the last. Its an ambitious story that depicts a deeply discontented city in the throes of revolution. Revolution is messy, tragic, hopeful, and most importantly, a process. This is a lengthy story, but every page of it was used wisely; sharing the history of the city, the fears and weaknesses of people oppressed, the mysteries and magic of the place and the mundane ways desperate people try to use these forces to their personal advantage, and the struggles of refugees within such conflict.

Gods and demons are forced to contend with the undeniable power of bureaucratic efficiency. Idealistic students and jaded gamblers struggle with comparable passion to change the world and to maintain the status quo to save their own skins respectively. The occupiers are united by the unhappy marriage of order and power which leads to self-righteous corruption that can afford only the barest level of self reflection.

Somehow Tchaikovsky managed to twine together fae magic, demons, magical industrial revolution, aliens, gods, income inequality, the cost of utopia, a light sprinkling of murder, and ghosts, and still produced not only a cohesive narrative but one that was so deeply engrossing I've lost sleep this entire week while trying to find out what happened next each night before bed.

I have no doubt that this will be a story that I revisit in the future and one that I will certainly be preordering so that I may have a physical copy to grace my shelves as well.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Head of Zeus for the ARC which in no way bais' my review.

I have been searching for a fantasy novel to fill the hole left when I finished "Malazan" over 12 months ago, and I want to thank Adrian for writing this book. Although they are very different in style and scale "City of Last Chances" has helped fill the void, and I honestly can't wait to read more of his work.

I love the eloquent prose, and the deep lore that is unraveled throughout, and in such a way that suspends disbelief, and I was hooked from the first scene. It moves well, and gets scary at points, but never strays from its central story. Some scenes I enjoyed more than others, but each scene has its purpose.

That being said this is a big, vocabulary packed, Proper Noun wielding epic fantasy that will not be for everyone. If dense industrial WW1/Russian Revolution inspired fantastical insurrection is not your thing then you will struggle to finish this one.

The setting is "Ilmar", and it feels like a real turn of the 20th century factory town under occupation, until the supernatural elements trickle down. The "Anchorwood" that is just outside the town, is a gateway to everywhere, and nowhere. Oh…and then there is the "Reproach!" The Reproach is the paranormal icing on the supernaturally fantastic cake.

This may be one of the more incredible fantasy novels I have ever read, and I wish I could erase it from my mind, and read it fresh. I have never read anything like it, and it bends and melds genres flawlessly. I've been trying to find a way to classify it, and am settling on, Dark Industrial Fantasy, but there is so much more going on with it than that.

"City of Last Chances" focuses primarily on the cast of players involved in a game of chance, and they are unfortunate enough to be the last people to see a treasure that is "ante up'd" as a bet. This treasure belongs to the occupation, and they will do anything they can to get their treasure back. Everyone wants this thing, and literal wars will be fought for it.

Every reader will relate to at least one of the vast cast of characters that take turns being the point of view character for the third person Narrator. I lost count of characters but I related to some more than others, but all were well developed, and real.

There is Yasnic, the last priest of a vagabond healing God. Blackmane, a foreign Pawnbroker that deals in the magical artifacts from within the city, and from the Anchorwood. There are soldiers, students, resistance factions, professors, factory workers, and all manor of people drowning in the post industrial revolution city of Ilmar. A city ready to explode under the pressure of oppression, and the past that lead to the boiling point of the events in the story.

I wish I could give this book more than 5 stars, but it may catapult itself into my grading rubric for Fantasy Novels. If you love the dark, heavy, dense, purple prose of classic fantasy you will love this novel. If you are a student of history, and it's revolutions, and posses a strong imagination you will love this book. If you want an easy read that requires hand holding, and baby stepping to a fairy tale ending you will not like this book. I loved this novel, if you couldn't tell from the review, but if you give it a chance you will love it too.

Casablanca meets Les Mis with a teensy bit of The Maltese Falcon, all thrown in to a fantasy setting that is wonderfully textured, (slightly gratuitously) dark, and more than a touch overstuffed. Just like the actual literary Les Mis!

Basically Tchaikovsky has addressed reader complaints about everything being a trilogy nowadays by making a standalone that...could really have been a trilogy. There are some wonderful reveals and reversals here that powered me through the pages, but oh man, that's a whole lotta pages to get through, characters to care about, and (re)double-crosses to keep straight. And (except for one genuinely holy crap final discovery that's only incidental to the main plot but still super-cool), the sorta-shocking surprises hit a bit weaker when it's sorta-shocking surprise #24601 of the book, the grim darkness is feeling, well, grim, and all in all you're starting to take Tchaikovsky's number.

Still, there’s just so much fun, punchy stuff here that it’s hard to be upset by its overabundance. The ragamuffin forces of decaying, decadent Romanticism get to duke it out with brittle and hypocritical Rationalism while an entire Broadway cast of hapless student revolutionaries and slimy academics and blessedly amoral mystics look on and scurry out of the way, sometimes successfully. There are demons! The Industrial Revolution! I Can’t Believe It’s Not WWI magical trench warfare! Small Gods! MacGuffins! It’s a long and occasionally exhausting ride, but the highs are very high indeed, and Tchaikovsky’s lurking warning — that factionalism will eat us all even sooner than body-crushing fascists or soul-eating monsters — is only too timely. Well done.

Adrian Tchaikovsky is a great storyteller, a master at creating smart, twisted plots. However, sometimes he goes a bit too far, so in love with his smart plot that he forgets that an enjoyable story is not only a matter of plot.
This is the impression I got from City of Last Chances. A great world-building, with infinite possibilities to explore. But it fell flat on me.
Every chapter is narrated from a different point of view, and the story advances with a good rhythm, like a choir song. But in the end, you don't have the possibility to emotionally attach to any character, you don't feel the pull to invest in going through the complex plot, because you don't care for them.
A missed occasion. I hope however to see more works situated in that world.

3.5 stars

City of Last Chances is one of those books that I don't really know how to feel about. I enjoyed parts of it, especially the creepiness of the Reproach and the inking of other worldness we get from the Anchorwood. But I also had a really hard time getting into the book. The world is so vast but we are only given tidbits at a time -- too little, really -- to fully comprehend it.

The book also throws us into multiple POVs and in the beginning its extremely hard to keep track as they just barely relate to one another. Its the formula where all these characters starting off at different points and end up converging to one massive conclusion, but we're given so little of their stories at a time that I found it hard to get really immersed into to any of the characters until well past the half way point of the book.

The writing is dense, but well written. There are a lot of great details and descriptions, but this is not a book that can be easily binged through. This book will require a slower read to really absorb what is going on, else its quite easy to find your mind wandering.

Oddly, I did find myself wanting to read more at the conclusion. Its hard to believe that this will be a true standalone as the world is so rich and has so much potential for expansion.

Thank you NetGalley and Head of Zeus for the e-ARC. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

New fantasy of politics, with magic but relatively few bugs (an insect god plays the largest bug role). A city that has been conquered by fascists who aim to eliminate everyone else’s culture, language, and religions has been chafing under that rule, especially since it was already full of refugees from places they’d previously conquered. But the city has a curse—maybe more than one—that make ruling it complicated. Divisions among the conquered, meanwhile, make fighting back even more complicated. It’s a complex world, including some intrusions from apparently completely different places and magics (the bouncer character searching for his wife has, with excellent narrative results, wandered in from a place that is very much elsewhere). But it cries out for more, so don’t expect more than minor arc resolutions.

This was the first Adrian Tchaikovsky book I’ve read, and I really quite enjoyed it. It was very descriptive, which at times I did find a struggle and have to re-read parts to fully grasp it. The characters where interesting, and well developed. I also really loved the premise!

<b>Possible Triggers:</b>
Death | Torture

<b>Characters:</b>
This is where it gets difficult to describe the book. The story is told from a multitude of perspectives. Hopping from one to the next through the chapters, especially in the first half of the book where it feels like it alights on a random consciousness that's party to whatever event is happening at the time, before dropping into something completely different than the next. There are recurring character views, but the story is not told predominantly from them.

<b>Positives:</b>
+ The world building. HOLY CRAP. Everything is covered. Weird beasties? Done. History? Check. Religion and Politics? Check check! Various cultures? CHECK! This is everything I love about Adrian Tchaikovsky's writing. There are just so many well thought out and interesting details.
+ Urgh that writing, so freaking intelligent. I love a good fantasy that also challenges my vocabulary. Yay for learning about new worlds and cultures while at the same time expanding my own knowledge base on archaic or infrequently used words.
+ Such horrifying madness and beasties. I think part of what makes what's happening in the story so scary is the fact that it's just off enough to know that you are descending into madness as it's happening and you can't really do anything about it. That's some real life nightmares right there.
+ The bad guys are fantastic, and I LOVE the priest/deity relationship in this book.

<b>Negatives:</b>
- I feel like this book is made for a different audience than I. It requires you to have (and enjoy) seeing the big picture from a non-focused lens. You don't have any specific character perspectives to latch on to, though you do end up seeing some figures throughout the book that are part of huge things going on throughout the story.

<b>Final Thoughts:</b>
This book is so many things and I have SO many feelings about it. It is exceptionally written, has gorgeous world building, awesome fights, glorious magic, horrifying curses . . . and yet, this story was not really for me. I felt somewhat lost a large part of the book because so much was going on from so many points of view that I struggled to hold onto (or even figure out) what was important. The ending of the book was freaking amazing and about ¾ of the way through the book I thought I had finally firmly grasped what was going on. This story reminds me of the feelings I had while I was reading Steven Ericksons ‘Malazan’ Series; amazing in scope and breadth, but very much a WIDE LENS view of a thing instead of a focused single or small group view. I am interested in reading more in this world as it seems SO open to MORE. Strongly recommend to people that enjoy larger views.

Thank you NetGalley for an ARC copy of this book! This book was everything you want out of a high fantasy book - unique and in depth world building, interesting and diverse characters, and a captivating plot. I very much enjoyed this and will add it to me re-read list.

Interesting example of fantasy in an occupied city on the brink of revolt. Mosaic type structure, with many PoVs and plotlines that intersect. The ending was somewhat rushed and could have used more space for a denouement.

This is a doorstop of a standalone fantasy novel with Tchaikovsky’s trademark rich and immersive world building. Here he has slanted the story telling a little in that it is the city (in other words the setting) which is the important component of the story, while the characters are actors on that vast stage who come and go. This is an interesting take for a western author since we all almost always use the ‘hero’s journey’/ monomyth style of story telling while a setting driven narrative is far more often found in non-western stories (eg many African myths). Some people are going to be put off by that but I found it refreshing and as a standalone it worked well, leaving me wanting more but not bereft that there was no follow up. A different sort of fantasy.

Tchaikovsky's City of Last Chances weaves a complex family and fiction structure into a gloomy, occupied city-scape -- Ilmar has long been without hope, long been a city of divided beliefs and downright debauchery and crime, now occupied by the perfectionist Pals. This work wore its inspirations on its sleeves, heavily reminiscent of the Black Iron Legacy and The Last War. Immediately I was transported back to Jia and Guerdon in these pages, but it was only a passing whiff of their smells, because Ilmar itself was a blend of something in itself.

3.5 stars. I really enjoyed this book! The worldbuilding was confusing at the beginning, but I ended up really loving that part. It's way more dystopian than I expected - I would say even more dystopian than fantasy. Yasnic the priest was by far my favorite character, but I enjoyed the frequent perspective shifts.

I'm so conflicted. On paper I should love this but it just ended up being a bit of an end of day chore getting through it.

There were a couple of things like liked. Firstly, character development will always be this authors strong point, I felt like I was getting to know who I was currently reading about however the 'cast' was too large to really keep track of who fit where and fully invest. Particularly because it took a good long while to plow through.

Secondly, good scene description, again another author strong point.

For me personally it didn't land, I felt a bit lost, I think lately I'm looking for easy reads, so this might be one for people looking to really get their teeth into something meaty.

The City of Last Chances
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Reviewed by Samantha Barthe “books by barthe”

Just imagine the great classic Les Miserable but add magic and demons and you can imagine what it was like reading The City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky. A city during a turbulent time, an unsettled lower class, a violent occupying force, and then--for a little extra pazazz--prostitute witches that can conjure demons…

There were multiple POV’s spread throughout a city on the brink revolution, as a reader you are slowly introduced to these characters and their role in this city, you then get to go on the journey of discovering how these characters will eventually intertwine in an overarching event. The writing style in this book was highly sophisticated, every word, every sentence, had a meaning. Tchaikovsky weaves an intricate web of plot under a veil of anticipation. While reading there is an ominous feeling of events about to occur and it lends itself to a unique atmosphere within the book.

My personal enjoyment came from the unique—and quite frankly, horrifying--fantastical creatures, Tchaikovsky’s incredible ability to write a book that is less centered around a classical plotline but more of a static chain of events leading to an end game scenario, and the philosophical questions and conversations that are slyly placed into unassuming conversations between characters.

This is a book a readers will appreciate the more they read!

I think that the book while dense, was very well written. It has a complex narrative with a large cast of characters that for me was slightly confusing at times but worth figuring that out. Overall I think that the novel was a fun, dark, twisting story that readers of more complex fantasy will enjoy.

3.5/5

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Tchaikovsky is one of my favorite science fiction writers and with his fantasy I don't have a great record with as I've DNFed Doors of Eden and had issues with Guns of the Dawn.

This book throws you in the deep end to start as there's a lot going on in the city of Ilmar with a lot of different POVs most of which are in different factions and parts of the city. The number of different characters is a strength and a weakness of the book where there's a lot of interesting things to keep track of and I really enjoyed the beginning to the middle of the book.

One thing that surprised me was the amount of horror elements. I really liked this aspect of the book and think Tchaikovsky does this well where it's unexpected and adds some cool elements of chaos to the book.

The ending is a bit weaker though for me as I didn't feel completely satisfied with how everything tied together and some of the mysteries that were set up in the beginning didn't pay off as much as I hoped.

The characters are all interesting and well done, they're sufficiently gray as are the rebel factions where it's a bit more complicated than rebels good, occupiers bad.

Overall I think this was a bit too ambitious for a standalone and needed more time to incorporate the different elements of the book either by being much longer or a part of a series. Also cutting some aspects could have made what's there a bit stronger.

I'm glad I read this book and there's a lot of good stuff in it, it's just a bit hard to review and think with a few changes it could have been much stronger.