Purgatory Mount

By: Adam Roberts

Narrated by: William Hope, Katherine Fenton

Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's Summary

An interstellar craft is decelerating after its century-long voyage. Its destination is V538 Aurigae, a now-empty planet dominated by one gigantic megastructure, a conical mountain of such height that its summit is high above the atmosphere. The ship's crew of five hope to discover how the long-departed builders made such a colossal thing, and why: a space elevator? A temple? A work of art? Its resemblance to the mountain of purgatory lead the crew to call this world Dante.

In our near future, the United States is falling apart. A neurotoxin has interfered with the memory function of many of the population, leaving them reliant on their phones as makeshift memory prostheses. But life goes on. For Ottoline Barragão, a regular kid juggling school and her friends and her beehives in the back garden, things are about to get very dangerous, chased across the north-east by competing groups, each willing to do whatever it takes to get inside Ottoline's private network and recover the secret inside.

Purgatory Mount, Adam Roberts's first SF novel for three years, combines wry space opera and a fast-paced thriller in equal measure. It is a novel about memory and atonement, about exploration and passion, and like all of Roberts' novels it's not quite like anything else.

©2021 Purgatory Mount (P)2021 Orion Publishing Group

Disappointing

The whole Purgatory Mount thing never came to anything let alone a conclusion - finished the book more confused than ever.
The majority of the book some 9 hours - involved dragging yourself along, hour after hour whilst the author explored the horrors of a Civil War in America, not being American a lot of this was baffling and made very little sense. Having reached an intangible conclusion it had no bearing on the rest of the book.
Having finished the book I feel I missed the message (if there was one) completely, it just took me 12 hours of my life to realise that.

I do have to say that the book was superbly narrated - maybe they have more idea as to what was going on.

two good books

This is really 2 novellas welded together, but both are excellent. Placing one within the other has an interesting effect and for me it mostly worked. If you are a fan of Roberts, it's definitely worth picking up, if you are new then this is a great place to start.