I'm glad I first read this instead of listening to it. I did not like the performance of this book. Even if I had liked it, Egan is famous for his in-depth physics and what-not in his books, and I tended to kind of skim over those parts, and if I was listening to it first, I'd have felt bad for missing parts of book and thought it was because I was being inattentive.
I still love the very beginning of this book the most, Orphanogenesis. It works well as a short story too.
I'd forgotten most of the rest of the book, and probably will forget it again, but there are ideas there that I fell in love with and love still. Ideas about people, not physics.