Ambitious and important, but it didn't quite work for me. I love O'Brien's style of writing - the non sequiturs, the minutiae of characters' behaviour, the descriptions of place, but it was the structure of this book that did it for me. The first half is set in a rural Irish village with a thinly disguised Karadzic disturbing the villagers, while the second half is about how one of the villagers flees to London and further, and is also filled with the terrible stories of refugees and immigrants. Important stories, but they made the novel so fractured that it stopped hanging together as a whole, but still didn't work as something experimental.