Gnomon by Nick Harkaway

Near-future Britain isn't just a state below surveillance yet one equipped on it: an intensive test in own transparency and ambient direct democracy. each motion is obvious, each be aware is recorded.

Diana Hunter is a refusenik, a has-been cult novelist who lives in a home with its personal Faraday cage: no digital signs can input or go away. She runs a lending library and conducts enterprise through barter. She is off the grid in a society the place the grid is every little thing. Denounced, arrested, and interrogated by means of a computing device that reads your lifestyles heritage out of your mind, she dies in custody.

Mielikki Neith is the investigator charged with studying how this tragedy happened. Neith is Hunter’s contrary. She is a lady in her major, a stalwart suggest of the approach. it's the such a lot democratic of governments, and Neith will guard it together with her existence.

When Neith opens the list of the interrogation, she reveals now not Hunter’s brain yet 4 others, none of which could almost certainly be there: the banker Constantine Kyriakos, pursued through a ghostly shark that eats firms; the alchemist Athenais Karthagonensis, jilted lover of St Augustine of Hippo and mom to his lifeless son, abducted and required to accomplish a miracle; Berihun Bekele, artist and grandfather, who needs to break out an arson fireplace by means of strolling via partitions – if purely he can have in mind how; and Gnomon, a sociopathic human intelligence from a far off destiny, falling backwards in time to behavior 4 assassinations.

Aided – or even hostile – via the light and paradoxical Regno Lönnrot, Neith needs to paintings her means in the course of the puzzles of her case and locate the that means of those very unlikely lives. Hunter has left her a message, yet is it one she should still heed, or a misinform lead her into disaster? and because the tales mix and the secrets and techniques and encryptions of Gnomon are published, the query turns into the main primary of all: who will stay, and who will die?