I went into this expecting a novel (mostly because it says "a novel" on the cover) and while it may be in the technical sense, in the colloquial sense it is not. It is, in fact, a loosely connected collection of short stories, and not a particularly well-constructed one (though it improved structurally near the end). I got a bit of whiplash reading it before I figured this out. That said, the individual stories were exquisite!