The marketing copy for this book only makes sense if you assume the copywriter was actually reading a variant of the novel from some only-vaguely-nearby parallel universe. The first sentence of the description talks about “the dismantling of the Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers” but those events hardly figure in the story at all. Honestly I might have read this sooner if it had simply been pitched to me as: it’s a multiverse tale from Iain Banks.
As usual I enjoyed Banks’s writing and Peter Kenny’s narration, and there are a handful of neat ideas here: that aliens would be most likely to visit Earth for the sake of tourism; that a multiverse-spanning human organization might actively seek to avoid ever coming into contact with aliens; that an ability to jump between bodies across worlds could be exploited as a means to immortality.. The characters don’t have much depth though. Worth the read, but not one of my favorite Banks novels.