With a birfurcated narrative that spends time in two separate realities, one almost-real with odd science fiction overtones and the other a dreamy but slightly sinister fantasy that might be a utopia or might be some sort of entropic hell, this reminded me of Iain Banks' Walking On Glass. What starts off as mysterious forays into slightly alien worlds filled with oddness and danger and conspiracy, turns, magically, in the the end to a meditation on mortality and eternity, and though the ending is unknowable, the imponderable and inevitable human confrontation with the certainty of one and the seeming impossiblity of the other is a powerful and moving modern evocation of the human condition.