I received a free copy of this novel via Netgalley in return for an honest review.

Scotland is reeling after a second negative Independence Referendum and a wave of horrific and unexplained violence unleashed by "Wee Lawrence" and his Wardens. Holyrood has collapsed and Scotland has fractured into a number of quasi-independent city states, led by the newly christened Greater Glasgow.

As the story opens the Wardens have been captured and disbanded and Wee Lawrence is awaiting trial but in the wake of all the upheaval there has been a swing towards power seizures and armed police and voluntary militias. The people of Glasgow are anxious, angry and uncertain and John Fallon's teenaged son has been missing for two days.

There is an interesting story lurking here but unfortunately it isn't the one Miller chose to tell. Instead of delving deeper into these extreme but not entirely impossible developments, instead of telling us more about the Horrors unleashed by the Wardens and exploring the dramatic personal and political ramifications of home-bred extremism, especially when there is no clear motivation, Miller leads us on a meandering journey that includes a boy named Tarka travelling through the galaxies with a dead family dog to find his deceased mother, a former vicar manifesting the stigmata and the spin-doctor of Greater Glasgow's leader who appears to be the incarnation of Satan. The inconsistent writing reflects these bizarre and often abrupt changes in tone, by turns overly-sentimentalised and redolent with horror-movie cliches such as "Enjoy the view, he said, while you can." On top of all of this was a dearth of Judeo-Christian symbolism that managed to be both terribly unsubtle and never fully explicated.

Overall in was a frustrating reading experience of a story which, if focused and simplified, could have been a gripping and thoughtful version of a dark future. Instead it was uneven and lapsed eventually into silliness ( )