The Quantum Thief

Jean le Flambeur, a gentleman thief, is held in a virtual prison where he must kill his own copy every day to survive. Mieli, a warrior from the Oort Cloud, breaks him out and carries him to the Oubliette, a moving city on Mars where time is the currency and memories can be bought, stolen and hidden. His freedom depends on one last heist: recovering his own lost memories.

Meanwhile, a young Martian detective named Isidore Beautrelet is drawn into a case that leads him toward the city's hidden workings and the thief himself. The story unfolds centuries after a technological singularity, in a solar system divided among posthuman powers.

The Quantum Thief is Hannu Rajaniemi's debut novel, first published in 2010 and the first book of the Jean le Flambeur trilogy. It mixes a classic caper with dense, unexplained far-future science, so readers are dropped into the world and expected to keep up.