Where the Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler

 

I read this book at the wrong time.

I had never heard of Ray Nayler until I saw his book The Mountain and the Sea on the nebula nomination list. (It’s still on my TBR pile!) 

When I saw a new book by him on NetGalley, I decided to give it a go. This book was hard. It’s set in a world with an incredibly brutal fascist regime where the leader’s mind keeps getting transferred into new clones bodies when the body degrades. Some of the imagery was evocative and some of the language was beautiful, but reading about this brutal government as my own country descends further into fascism was not the diverting SF novel I was looking for. I also felt like many of the characters were ciphers with no interiority. 

An interesting book, but not for me at this point in in time.