2019/04: Rosewater -- Tade Thompson

"We have more experience than any Western country in dealing with first contact. What do you think we experienced when your people carved up Africa at the Berlin Conference? You arrived with a different intelligence, a different civilisation, and you raped us. But we're still here." [p. 231]

Kaaro is a sensitive, able to read the thoughts and emotions of those around him. He works for a bank, blocking criminal sensitives from stealing personal information from the thoughts of their victims: protection is achieved by reading classic literature aloud. Well, that's the day job: Kaaro also works for the government, conducting interrogations and finding lost or hidden things. Or people. The mental space in which Kaaro operates is termed the xenosphere, and it is a consequence of the arrival, in 2012, of an alien lifeform known as Wormwood, which landed in Hyde Park, burrowed into the earth's crust and seeded the biosphere with a network of fungi-like filaments that bind to human nerve endings.

Wormwood has not departed. It established itself in Nigeria in the 2050s, creating a biodome around which the town of Rosewater has accreted. Once a year the biodome opens, briefly, and the sick are healed, or changed: the dead resurrect. Kaaro was there when the dome was raised, but his narrative -- shifting between the 2040s, 2050s and 2060s -- only gradually approaches the events within the dome, and the link between Kaaro himself and Wormwood.

Kaaro is not an especially likeable character: he's sexist, immoral, a thief who steals from his own family. But when he hears of the deaths of other sensitives, and begins to investigate the phenomenon, he finds that he is uniquely qualified to unravel the crime.

I liked this novel a lot. The world Thompson has built is quite different, yet recognisably a product of our own: America has taken isolationism to extremes, Nigeria is ascendant because of Wormwood's presence, and humans -- though some of them have been transformed into quantum extrapolators -- are still driven by mundane human urges, lust and love and envy and greed. Kaaro's first-person narration is rich with physical detail and sensory extravagance: when he enters 'thoughtspace', his experiences are hallucinogenic, and he perceives them with every sense.

First of a trilogy, but does stand alone: definitely worth reading.