Children of Time

This year has been a lucky one for weird, sprawling sci-fi. Children of Time is arguably the best of the bunch. It's certainly the most elegantly written. Given that half of the book was told through the (many) eyes of giant jumping spiders, it weirdly gelled with An Immense World, which I was reading at the same time. The pacing and storytelling is superb. Most unusual? It ends with an optimistic rejection of the zero-sum nature of the Universe.