This book had one of the best beginnings I’ve ever read, followed by one of the slowest and most boring middles, before it ramped slowly upwards towards a pretty decent ending. This is another Thousand and One Nights type nested-stories book, except the storyteller is a crochety old man, unjustly imprisoned in a foreign country, whose only friend is his extremely sweet and naive apprentice, and whose only weapon is the vast library of stories in his brain. From his prison cell, he grasps at any bits of news of the outside world that he can get, slowly weaving them into an almost unbelievable escape plan. This book has a lot to say about stories, about the stories that we tell ourselves both individually and collectively, and how we use them to shape our lives and our fates. It’s a truly interesting framing device, but personally I got tired of the narrator pretty quickly; he’s extremely unlikeable and makes very questionable decisions, and you never get to leave his head. I did love the cast, which included a lot of extremely strong female characters (though not many of them were likeable either). There was a lot of politics and it was a bit difficult to keep track of all the players; also, some of the stories were clearly meant to convey an underlying point but that point was often lost on me. I eventually made it through (as does the storyteller, who obviously lives to tell the tale) but, like the storyteller, I also feel like I suffered unduly in the process. I recommend the audiobook; Langton does a very good grumpy old man and it’s probably thanks to his narration that I got through the boring bits of the book at all (I would likely have abandoned a print copy partway through). The oral storytelling format also works really well with the first-person narration.