This is the first collection by an author who has won nearly all the important science fiction awards for fiction. All the stories are dark, but the interessing thing is how different the dystopias are from one another while the down-trodden characters are all coping with things in similar fashions. I could not listen to all of them in a few marathon sessions because of the deep gloom they all display. There a a couple of stories which made me angry, too, though the problem was not the writing but subject matter. Some readers might need warnings about content. The author has a gift for constructing an imaginary world so detailed in its claustrophobic aspects which constitutes a cruel trap for the characters who often are driven to violence by their situations. The two novellas The Calorie Man and Yellow Card Man were in my opinion the best, each inspiring the author's longer work, although in some ways the title story is the saddest. The global crises driving the plot - predatory capitalism, environmental destruction, antisocial genetic manipulation - have become more important issues in the fifteen years since this was published, I think, joined by others.

The audiobook narration was excellent and did a good job to immerse me in the story. A couple of the tales were written too slowly for my taste, but the best ones were fantastically breath-taking pieces of storytelling.