The Fractal Prince

Jean le Flambeur, a post-human gentleman thief, has been freed from his virtual prison. He now travels toward Earth with the warrior Mieli and her sentient ship, Perhonen. He still wants to open a Schrödinger box that holds the secret of his own past, and pursuers are closing in. Mieli, meanwhile, learns unsettling things about how he was captured.

On Earth, a ruined planet haunted by stories, the walled desert city of Sirr holds two sisters, Tawaddud and Dunyazad Gomelez. A murder investigation pulls them in. So does the politics of their father, Cassar, who wants to use Tawaddud's tie to a merchant who is a "gogol" to swing a Council vote on a treaty with the Sobornost.

A third thread, more cryptic than the others, follows an isolated boy who meets strange visitors.

This is the second book of the Jean le Flambeur trilogy, after The Quantum Thief and before The Causal Angel. Its structure follows One Thousand and One Nights: stories nest inside stories, and the whole takes a fractal shape. That form suits its preoccupations with memory, minds stored as data, and a reality that can be told and retold.

The separate strands move toward each other as Jean's course meets the sisters', and the book turns on the awakening of a Sobornost god.