Summerland

By: Hannu Rajaniemi

Narrated by: Antonia Beamish

Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's summary

An awe-inspiring account of the afterlife and what happens when it spills over into the world of the living. The new novel from the most exciting new voice in the genre since Neal Stephenson.

Loss is a thing of the past. Murder is obsolete. Death is just the beginning.

In 1938, death is no longer feared but exploited. Since the discovery of the afterlife, the British Empire has extended its reach into Summerland, a metropolis for the recently deceased.

Yet Britain isn't the only contender for power in this life and the next. The Soviets have spies in Summerland, and the technology to build their own god.

When SIS agent Rachel White gets a lead on one of the Soviet moles, blowing the whistle puts her hard-earned career at risk. The spy has friends in high places, and she will have to go rogue to bring him in.

But how do you catch a man who's already dead?

Read by Antonia Beamish.

©2018 Orion Publishing Group Limited (P)2018 Hannu Rajaniemi

A spy story with innovative stakes

Every spy story is about the personal costs of intelligence work. Usually, they're also about the ideological stakes of the cold war or the moral compromises of the war on terror, but Rajaniemi invents a whole new reason to care about these spy games: giving the spies actual tangible souls.

An excellent story and well read!

Hannu Rajaniemi is rapidly becoming my favorite author. I look forward to even more stories by him.

Not for Me

Rajaniemi is a very creative, articulate, clever and amusing writer. But there are far too many suspensions of my own cosmology standing in my way of appreciating this violent science fantasy story. In our era of easily accessible, accurate information and verifiable facts about non-corporeal experiences, I was taking issue with the most essential givens of the book's stories and plots. So I stopped less than an hour into the book because I found the book's metaphysics to be unnecessarily misleading. That I bought the audio version on a whim meant it wasn't money well-spent. So next time I try out an author's work which is new to me, I'll try the time-honored method of instead glossing a paper copy to see if I might like it.

I deeply regret listening to this audiobook

I should have just read it. Hannu's brilliance is entirely smothered by the inexcusably bad audio production. The books volume isn't normalized, the whispers are inaudible and the more raucous characters are painfully loud. Character dialog volume swings so frequently you have to listen with your hand permanently on the volume control.