I have never read a book like this one before. It's poetic and strange and captivating and tells an epic and expansive story that I'm still digesting. This was a complex but wonderful novel about war and oppression and reincarnation and stories and I'm not sure I'll ever read anything else like it.

I thought this was very good and I will have to add this to the shop shelves. Thank you for the chance for us to review.

Thanks to TorDotCom for an eARC in exchange for an honest review!

Honestly, I don't 100% know what I just read, but I think I loved it! I underestimated how experimental this epic sci-fi could be and I couldn't be happier. We start off with following two souls in one life until we see them reincarnate multiple times across multiple lifetimes to the far future. There is time travel, body horror, fantastical elements, references to the Sri Lakan Civil War, etc. A lot to balance and keep track of, but Chandrasekera manages this well if the reader is also patient to follow the threads. I think it would take multiple rereads in order for me to pull back every layer, but Chandrasekera is a new powerhouse in the speculative fiction space. Looking forward to going back to his debut novel, The Saint of Bright Doors.

Content Warnings: war, violence, blood, body horror, colonization, imperialism, murder, death of parent, torture, sexual content, slavery, death, genocide, racism

I wasn't able to finish this title. What started out as a really entertaining and interesting premise (the idea of the fandom and the audience working as agents in the plot) became a bit too confusing of a world. Would like to eventually get back to it.

[Most Insane Fiction of 2024 and Maybe All-Time]
A gritty, thought-provoking read. The story’s a bit heavy, dealing with themes like societal collapse and the human condition. The characters are complex and the world is bleak but fascinating. It’s not an easy read, but if you like your dystopias with a lot of depth, this one’s worth checking out.

this felt very creative, fun, fantastical, but ultimately I had a little trouble following it. I did enjoy the cultural aspects that this story was steeped in and it made it feel very lush but some pieces were a little to far reaching for me.

wow! Rakesfall was an excellent read. I loved the historical element of the Sri Lankan civil war, it was very interesting. Loved the characters.

Thanks so very much to Netgalley and the publisher for kindly providing me this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review. I do reviews on my main social media platforms and will be providing my full review there as I get through my TBR blacklist. Adding star rating as placeholder. Thanks again!

I'm honestly not sure where to begin with this book, except that I really liked it, and also I had a glitch in the NetGalley app halfway through and thought it had disappeared, so I read two other books in between. The many layers of this story would have fallen together a little easier for me if I had read the whole thing consecutively, so I'm looking forward to an enlightening reread at some point! But I also think that I can't possibly understand everything happening in this book, and I'm not meant to, which is exciting to me. I don't have the necessary cultural context about Sri Lanka, but I can ride along and thoroughly enjoy myself, and I can learn!

I really dig a lot of what I do understand that's going on in this book though; the layered, looping structure is really exciting, and the way Chandrasekera weaves speculative elements into so many different settings—iterations of the past and the future and the even farther future—is unique each time, with some connecting elements that carry you through from one story to the next. And there's so much incredibly striking imagery, visuals that are going to stay with me for a long time. My reading experience of this book was weirdly drawn out through my own ineptitude with the app, but I would keep reading about Annelid and Leveret through so many more of their strange lifetimes!

This was a trip of a book. It will keep you on your toes as you travel through space and time. Perfect for those who loved This is How You Lose the Time War.

Thank you to Netgalley for the ARC.

Rakesfall is one of the most unique books I have ever read. I recommend it for fans of speculative fiction and complex narratives.

Beautifully written, sweeping and poetic, but ultimately Rakesfall was a bit difficult to stay grounded in. Even the most fantastical, abstract narratives need something to anchor to.

My thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of this book for my free and unbiased review. I really struggled with the style of Rakesfall. I put it down a number of times and just could not fully engage. Sadly, I wound up DNF’ing at about 30%. However, that could be a function of my own reading preference rather than the quality of the project. Just not my cup of tea.

rating 4.5

The intricate narrative kept me on my toes, always guessing what would happen next and how each new perspective would tie into the existing storyline. Beyond the engaging writing style, Rakesfall ignited my curiosity, compelling me to explore the referenced stories, figures, and historical events.

Thank you for providing an e-ARC; all opinions expressed are my own.

I'm not going to lie this is a tough book to try and rate by traditional standards. The writing was absolutely beautiful, with almost a lyrical quality at times. I loved that the book was broken down into sections because if it had been straight through there would have been some serious confusion as it is already such a complex book. Honestly the best way that I can describe this book is that it is a VIBE. There are so many layers to each section and so many underlying messages and things to reflect on. The characters are memorable, the settings are interesting and intricate. Can I for sure tell you what happens in each part of this story? No not exactly, it's complicated. But I can tell you that I have no doubts that this will be a book that I read multiple times and that I will get something new out of it every time.

If I could not leave a star rating, I wouldn’t. I honestly don’t know how to rate this…

I don’t know if I missed something because I listened to the audio, but I had a really difficult time following what was going on. Some of the chapters/parts were really good, but then others I truly had no idea what was going on.

I think this had a lot of potential, but it didn’t quite work. I loved the idea of an SFF book loosely let in Sri Lanka, and I think the parts that were more based in reality did work better than the more SFF parts.

I almost want to reread with my eyes to see if it makes more sense that way, but I’m not sure that it would…

A complicated book to review. Beautiful writing on a sentence level, a really big concept, but it's hard to follow as an actual story. This is likely to really hit it out of the park for some readers, but not for those that enjoy a plot-driven story or get easily annoyed by confusing time jumps.

If you have read his previous novel The Saint of Bright Doors, you might think yourself familiar with the strangeness Chandrasekera puts in his stories - the geography that shapes itself to will and politics, the deftly inexplicable intrusions of the fantastical into the world. But I say to you, having read Rakesfall now, my friend, you have absolutely no idea the depth of the pool into whose shallow end you have merely dipped your toes. The weirdness is off the charts, and he's holding no one's hand this time, except to drag them through the layer by vivid layer of this strange, piecemeal story that slowly coalesces into a sublime whole, without you ever noticing it happening.

The story follows two characters (or perhaps more) whose lives touch each others again and again and again, throughout time and space and branching timelines. Through a sequence of at first what seem like unconnected stories, we see them relate and relate and relate over and again to each other, to the world, and to the substance of their own relationship, until we begin to see that the story has never really just been about them, as if the kind of relationship that transcends lifetimes can ever be a "just". I've seen the book described by some as a series of short stories with a thread of connection between them, but that does no justice to how thoroughly interwoven each part of this novel is, if you're paying attention to look for the connecting threads. They are everywhere, offhand comments and motifs and themes and ideas and names and ghosts all. Some of them even reach further, back to The Saint of Bright Doors, although I would not call this any kind of sequel. What do these characters do? Well, many things. But it is not in their actions that the story really lies, but in their interrelations, and their relationship to the story, to the very idea of stories, instead.

Some books are plot heavy. Some are character driven. Some world-building focussed. Rakesfall is in the rarer category of theme-driven, and the even rarer still selection of theme-driven and also good. And its strength there lies in not letting itself get too bogged down in one single message, to the detriment of all else. Some stories have a single driving ideal at the core of themself, and by focussing on it to the exclusion of all other parts of craft, they wear down the reader so much without rewarding them that the book becomes a lecture instead. Chandrasekera does not have one note here, but a symphony - to say this book cares about one thing is to have missed five others. I'm sure I have missed five different things in my own muddling through. But I found plenty, and each is gently, quietly interwoven with all the others, to be drawn out by someone wanting to look for it. As a story about stories, it understands how crucial a part the reader plays in that dynamic - the need to trust them, to let them find their own way, their own understanding of what is provided, and feel no need to browbeat them into comprehension, to require them to take a single canonical point. The themes I found in it - and enjoyed, well-explored as they were - were around power and oppression, colonialism, autonomy, destiny and inevitability, the role of the player in the story, the power of choices. I am certain I missed some axes of it that overlap into politics I don't know well.

But the reader does need to be willing to do the work. And that, I think, is going to be the trouble for this book. It is never going to be escapism, or a pacy, distracting, linear read. It's a book whose content, whose meaning, is to be worked for, and it is important to go in willing to put in that bit of effort.

Because if you do? You will absolutely be rewarded.

If nothing else, the prose is delicious. One of the delights of being the age I currently am is that there are now more and more authors writing books who grew up on my internet, on my references, in my generationalect, so to speak. People who use the slang I use, in the tone I use it, whose view of the world is so clearly coloured by the vast, unpoliced, unpatrolled and uncontrolled wilderness that was the internet of the 90s and 00s. I see that in Rakesfall, too, in the way Chandrasekera switches tone and formality, using a downshift into the casual as a subtle irony, or to undercut a mood, like so:

The simile of the two-handled saw is not a parable. It isn't even a story. That it is self-consciously a simile suggests an unseriousness, a little haha hoho, a little lol j/k.

Or the way tone and formatting intrude in the following segment of a quasi-mythical tale within the story:

One day, the king on his throne hears faraway weeping, and he knows it's from the haunted cemetery outside his city, where a seditionist poet impaled for high treason cries, undying or undead, for water. All his soldiers pee themselves a little, so the king calls up his favourite wrestler, biggest face in the city, beloved far and wide as the best good guy who isn't afraid of anything, and the king says, my Beloved Bro, will you Please take this Cup of Water out unto the Dread Cemetery and give it to that Loud Fucker, and Tell him to (a) Pipe down and (b) give Thanks to the generosity of his King? And the wrestler says, Sure Thing my King.

There's a whole essay you could write about the use of capitalisation here, as well as the contrast between that "unto" and the "Loud Fucker"/"Beloved Bro". The way the tone rattles around between high, mythic formality and the numinous and then right down into the most informal and millennial of slang resonates beautifully with how the story is, itself, told, meandering through time and place, through people who are the same but different, from the visceral act of self-flaying in a bathroom to an undying being flying through space. So often, "inconsistent tone" would be a deserved insult, but here, it is anything but - in that inconsistency, it maintains coherence with its own ideas of itself. It could not be the story it is if it were tied down to a single way of speaking and being. This is especially true for tying it in to the characters, who might otherwise be held at arms length from the telling, and who need to be in close, for you to see the echoes of themselves throughout their selves across their time.

Even aside from his tonal choices, the language Chandrasekera uses is consistently well-chosen. He dwells often on the physical, on skin and blood and texture, on the cutting of flesh and the lolling of tongues, and that is so, so necessary in a book whose concept and overarching purpose are so distant from the grit of humanity. It needs tying down, grounding to something familiar, to let us explore that vastness.

But it is not just the prose. Though distant, the characters are well-drawn, and though confusing at first, the plot coalesces into something truly great by the end of the book. Where many stories experience a quickening towards the end, a visible moment where things begin to come together, and where the pace of events kick up a notch - the Eurovision key change moment, if you will - this has none of that. I say "coalesce" because that is exactly what my understanding did, emerging from the mist of the story with delicately paced exactitude. There was no one moment of insight, just a steady, dawning comprehension that lasted over a third of the book, and left the final page closing with a deep sense of satisfaction.

With every compliment I can muster meant - because it's one of my favourite books, and one I would so rarely draw a comparison to - what Rakesfall reminded me most pointedly of is Vellum, by Hal Duncan. Both are stories that use concepts of personal archetypes, a group of souls rattling around time's dice cup, bumping into each other through eternity. Both reject linearity. Both reject categorisation. Both embrace the grit and grime of humanity alongside the sublime, and refute any idea of a mismatch between them. They're not the same book, by any means, but they have some of the same spirit, and must be approached in similar ways. I suspect Rakesfall, as I find Vellum does, would reward each reread with discoveries of new twists, new nuances and new references, and give the reader a different experience every time. And, ultimately, both are books I want to put into people's hands and just say "it's fucking weird, I can't explain it, just trust me... and come back when you're done". They're books to have conversations about. They're books to have conversations with.

Which is, ultimately, why I adore Rakesfall. It's a story that understands stories, and asks the reader to work with it, to reach out and meet it part way, to understand those stories too. To draw from a negative review I saw of it online - it is an experience as much as it is a story - and the beauty of that is that that experience is necessarily a singular beast. My time with it will not be your time, nor my own in a year when I come back to it (as I surely will), pen and paper in hand, ready to make notes. And because it yearns for you to reach out to it, to work with it, because you must do the work to listen and to think, the experience that comes out at the end feels all the more intimate, all the more personal, all the more beautiful.

I need to lie down in the grass and just stare up at the sky for a few hours or years while I digest this book. This is a gorgeous fever dream of an epic science fiction novel about time, history, and love reminiscent of Cloud Atlas and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.

The main characters live out many lives in many universes and times, from past through future. Through it all there's rumination on meaning and suffering and war and everything else. It's filled with beautiful sentences that demand you to stop and think. It's a book worth reading twice.

I'm already thinking about the people I should gift this to.

Thank you to the publisher for the free ARC.

I haven't read this author's previous book, but after this one I will definitely be picking it up! This was a lyrical and yes maybe a little "weird" story following Annelid and Leveret and their lives across generations. I agree with some other reviewers who say that fans of This Is How You Lose the Time War may enjoy this one as well!