Purgatory Mount

By: Adam Roberts

Narrated by: Katherine Fenton, William Hope

An interstellar craft is decelerating after its century-long voyage. Its destination is V538 Aurigae ?, a now-empty planet dominated by one gigantic megastructure, a conical mountain of such height that its summit is high above the atmosphere. The ship's crew of five hope to discover how the long-departed builders made such a colossal thing, and why: a space elevator? a temple? a work of art? Its resemblance to the mountain of purgatory lead the crew to call this world Dante.

In our near future, the United States is falling apart. A neurotoxin has interfered with the memory function of many of the population, leaving them reliant on their phones as makeshift memory prostheses. But life goes on. For Ottoline Barragão, a regular kid juggling school and her friends and her beehives in the back garden, things are about to get very dangerous, chased across the north-east by competing groups, each willing to do whatever it takes to get inside Ottoline's private network and recover the secret inside.

Purgatory Mount, Adam Roberts's first SF novel for three years, combines wry space opera and a fast-paced thriller in equal measure. It is a novel about memory and atonement, about exploration and passion, and like all of Roberts's novels it's not quite like anything else.

Shortlisted for the 2021 BSFA award for Best Novel!©2021 Purgatory Mount (P)2021 Orion Publishing Group

I want my credit back!

A second, unrelated book is sandwitched in the middle of the novel promised in the description. The promised story starts out well, but the author couldn't figure out where that story should go, so he kills everyone and ends the book. The narrator was good. I can't feel sorry for the pig people, the author is the only one who thinks they are needed on the ship.