He wasn't wearing his glasses and misread the title, leading him to ask incredulously if I was really reading a biography of Angela Merkel. Please try not to have any more good ideas until I get to measure them against the possibility that you have gone entirely off your rocker. I usually only mark as to-read books I own, but on seeing that Nick Harkaway has a second novel due out there is absolutely no doubt I'm going to read it. If you're not paying attention, you'll miss things like that, and I found myself often flipping back to see what was said about a particular subject or person or location earlier in the book.

But if one believes in God, a god who knows all that has happened, all that is happening, and all that is to come, then the decision was made long before you were ever offered the choice. In the end, for all its old-new, serio-comic hyphenation, Angelmaker turns out to be a solid work of modern fantasy fiction, coupling credit-crunch anxiety with an understandable nostalgia for the mythical days of "good, wholesome, old-fashioned British crime". As he awaits death, he thinks about the three people whose journeys are linked to his-journeys that will continue the day after he is gone….

As detective Laurence Page and his colleague investigate the murder of a philanthropist and rich philosopher, Christopher becomes a person of interest in the murder investigation.

What Angelmaker most resembles, to my mind, is a vast and sprawling Neal Stephenson novel, the perfect companion piece for his Cryptonomicon. My mind has been blown by this book, it's a blend of reality and fantasy, I literally can't praise this book enough! The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. What England would dream, if it could dream, would be for pre-Cold War-style field espionage, with its fake mustaches and poisoned cocktails, to suddenly become relevant again. My speech is plainer than my writing — and if you've been reading my posts for long you can tell my writing is pretty unsophisticated.In fact, with its lovingly hand-made "Ruskinite" technology, there's something in Angelmaker that sets it apart from steampunk's usual fetishisation of industrial Victoriana.