I'm not sure how this one came across my radar, but I'm always a sucker for "lost" dystopian novels (ask me about Katharine Burdekin's *Swastika Night* some time). After a couple of disappointing reads at the tail end of December I was hoping that this would close the year out on a high.

That wasn't really the case, unfortunately. I didn't dislike this by any means, but I didn't love it either. It's a slippery, ethereal thing, dreamlike in a way that's not necessarily good. The subtitle ("A Sequence of Unease") is definitely accurate - the text evokes a mood rather than anything concrete, building up layers of unsettling tension that work wonderfully. But there isn't anything to grab hold of, no real sense of who these people are or what's happening, and I found that as much as I enjoyed reading it the images slipped off my mind and faded much like a dream does upon waking.

That's not to say that it's forgettable. There are definitely some great stand-out moments that I'll remember, in particular a very tense sequence about halfway through where the narrator tries to navigate their way to a safehouse through a hostile village by following cryptic clues hidden in an old game. There's a real sense of danger and lurking violence in those pages that I really loved, and it's one of the few moments in the book where what's actually happening breaks through the fog of unease and makes itself clear on the page.

I definitely enjoyed this, and I think it's still a very relevant book, but I don't know if it's one that I'll revisit in a hurry.