【 CITY OF LAST CHANCES 】

book 1 in the Tyrant Philosophers series

Genre: Fantasy
Audience: Adult
Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Published: December 2022
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Pages: 500 (hardback)

Oh boy, this was a marathon to finish (in a bad way). I’ll preface everything but politely saying, this is clearly just not my cup of tea. Objectively, Tchaikovsky is a fantastic writer for his own niche, but it was all too much for me.

So I write this for those whose reading tastes are more like my own and to say, this one probably isn’t for you. I found this very hard-going, unbearably convoluted and exhaustingly lacking in a meaningful plot. It’s like you can see what the point is, but only if you squint your eyes and don’t try to focus too hard – that sort of thing.

I was totally sucked in by the beautiful cover and the intriguing plot, so I am disappointed that this didn’t work out for me. I was so sure that this would be a new favourite author, whose backlist I could happily plunge into. But I find myself worriedly wading away from any further voyages into his work now.

It was just … it was okay. But also terrible. I wanted to see it through, so I did. But I don’t know what the point of the whole thing was, to be honest. You can grasp a good-enough fistful of the plot from the first 20% and then nothing really develops much from there. The characters seem to be complex, but none of them seem to achieve anything or do much that is genuinely interesting.

There’s also an omniscient narrator, who is interesting but also feels out of place – you expect it will have much to say and will build the whole narrative up into a grand crescendo, but I finished book with so many questions and zero bother to find answers for them. There are so many perspectives, too, and I imagine that will put off a hefty number of people (and they all have strange, fantastical names, so even I struggled to keep tabs, and I love multi-POVs).

The main point of enjoyment for me in this was the narration. While the audio was edited in a bit of a choppy fashion, the voices put on and way this was narrated was actually very good. So hats off to the narrator for helping me hang on until the end. In a way, this ended up feeling like it was written for the enjoyment of writing a ‘clever’ story, and the focus on trying to achieve that cleverness meant it missed the mark of actually delivering such a story in the end.

Title: City of Last Chances
Series: The Tyrant Philosophers
Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
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There has always been a darkness to Ilmar, but never more so than now. The city chafes under the heavy hand of the Palleseen occupation, the choke-hold of its criminal underworld, the boot of its factory owners, the weight of its wretched poor and the burden of its ancient curse.
What will be the spark that lights the conflagration?

Despite the city’s refugees, wanderers, murderers, madmen, fanatics and thieves, the catalyst, as always, will be the Anchorwood – that dark grove of trees, that primeval remnant, that portal, when the moon is full, to strange and distant shores.

Ilmar, some say, is the worst place in the world and the gateway to a thousand worse places.

Ilmar,
City of Long Shadows.
City of Bad Decisions.
City of Last Chances.