It took me a minute to get into this book and connect with the characters but now I'm certain I'll be rereading this.
(I was thinking about the rating of this as I went and it only kept climbing so I'm defaulting to 5 stars for the minute. We shall see if my eventual reread upholds this.)

This was stunning and incredibly managed to capture the guts and brutality of the front lines of war while also providing moments of light and warmth. 

I'm on a constant quest for stories with "old-timey queers" and this delivered exactly what I wanted.

Not really a spoiler, could potentially be described as an anti-content warning but just incase you like to go in knowing nothing about what to expect:

Although this was set in 1914, a time where homosexuality was against the law, this book had a distinctive lack of homophobia woven through it. It seemed that a great deal of the characters were queer themselves or just really cool calm and collected about the whole affair. Slurs are present but not with malicious intent.

I also really like when multiple languages come together and this book gave me French, German and Greek so that was very nice.

Heartbreaking and brutal, but beautiful.

Not in the headspace for this but I'll come back to it later

This book was an interesting thought experiment.

I have an interest in octopuses; I had read Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith before and I'm glad I had read that before reading this to have more background knowledge about octopuses. Having background knowledge isn't a must-have for reading this though, Nayler includes snippets from fictional non-fiction books written by some of the characters which give some insights you might need for anything discussed.

I think how octopuses, being so far from us on the evolutionary scale, have evolved to where they are now is fascinating and I enjoy how this book considers the future of the species if they further evolve certain factors like lifespan and relationships - how these would impact our interactions with them or how we as humans could co-exist with another intelligent life form. 

Character development isn't a strong point of this book at all but when I was reading it I found it very easy to get immersed and to want to keep reading. There are at least 3 POVs throughout which don't feel connected but they do come together by the end of the book and make sense for why we get those other views. All in all, not a bad book.