This is enormously inventive and just so quietly riveting. I wouldn't have thought, before reading, that "quietly" would be the right word for a book in which a Frankenstein figure is pieced together out of the victims of suicide bombings and goes out to wreak vengeance, but it is. For all the very real horror on every page of this book - and by that I mean terrorism, corruption, disappearing family members and the like - there's something so unmelodramatic about everything that's happening here, and I can't quite encompass how the author does it. Part of it is, I think, the continual focus on small moments: a grieving mother's ongoing conversation with the picture of a saint, the struggle of a small hotelier to keep his business alive, the difficulty of navigating a promotion that puts you above your friends. But part of it is the prose, which resolutely refuses to wallow, and which - drawing on the source material - provides in some ways a philosophical debate about the nature of monstrosity. Sometimes I found it perhaps a little too muted, but I can already tell this is a library book I want to go get my own copy of.