This was a slightly difficult book for me to get through, not through any fault of the book, but just because with the Canadian election currently in full debate cycle and Brexit still filling the headlines and the US reelection fast approaching and Trump's impeachment continuing to on-and-off-again, I'm just so overloaded with election and politics that it was a bit hard to face so much in my entertainment also.

That said, this is a very intelligent, thoughtful book looking at a world which is divided into "centenals" of about 100,000 people each; and whichever party wins the most centenals globally forms a "supermajority" which gives it more power over the others. The story's set just before an election (elections happen every 10 years) and we follow a number of different characters viewing the politicking from different perspectives and trying to push different agendas. The two main characters turn out to be Ken, who works for Policy1st (one of the parties), and Mishima, who works for Information, which seems to be a sort of central internet provider/Google substitute type service that is used globally and that also runs the elections.

There are suspicions of parties trying to influence the election, there are voters behaving stupidly and short-sightedly, there is some interesting hypothetical future technology, and the structure of the centenals in general is quite interesting and rather reminiscent of the city-states in Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash". There was a little too much info-dump exposition in trying to explain all the complex politics, which made some parts move a bit slowly; and there were some characters whose perspectives we were given but who didn't really seem that important to us or to the plot in the end (like Domaine, and Yoriko) -- they didn't really seem necessary to me? At any rate I didn't really get attached to them, or even get much of a feel for their personalities. I enjoyed Ken and Mishima however, and once we got out of the politics exposition and more into the action it was an interesting story with, of course, some cautionary tales for our own current politics.

Good first novel with very interesting ideas, would pick up another book by the author, although would hope for maybe a little less political development and a little more character development instead next time :)