Too Like the Lightning

Mycroft Canner is a convicted criminal who wanders the twenty-fifth century performing acts of service as a condition of his sentence. Carlyle Foster is a sensayer, providing spiritual counseling in a world where public religion is forbidden. Together they orbit a boy named Bridger who can bring inanimate objects to life, a power that threatens the carefully engineered stability of a future society built on globe-girdling Hives, mandatory content labeling, and the suppression of gender as a social category. Ada Palmer's Hugo Award-winning debut is a dense, allusive, formally ambitious work that reinvents the utopian novel.

Jefferson Mays narrates Palmer's intricate, multilingual prose with remarkable command, handling the novel's eighteenth-century epistolary register, its philosophical dialogues, and its action sequences with equal facility. The narration is demanding work for a demanding text, and Mays rises to it. At over twenty hours, Too Like the Lightning rewards patient listeners who engage with its ideas as seriously as its plot.