Transition, by Iain Banks
I'm sorry to say that this late Iain Banks work didn't really grab me. The idea of people with access to different parallel universes trying to pull off politically convenient changes to their timeline is not original to him, and has been done better by others (most recently in The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, which we shortlisted for the Clarke Award). A lot of the characters are simply nasty without the redeeming virtues of depth or reflecting our own lived reality. One of my favourite writers, but really not one of my favourite books of his.