An inventive and complex novel, or rather six novels nested inside one, like Russian matryoshka dolls. They range from historical fiction to murder mystery to science fiction, with threads of previous and future stories tucked into the text. All of them are entertaining and written brilliantly, and the book’s only flaw is a postmodern and perhaps deliberate failure to establish the relationship of the different stories to each other. Minor consistency issues don’t take away from the excitement of reading this and putting the pieces together.