Gnomon: A Novel

"This is a big, ambitious book that sometimes trips over its own bigness but reads like a game of literary telephone played by Phillip K. Dick, Arthur Conan Doyle and William Gibson. It begins (and is centered, kinda) in a near-future, AI-governed, digitally interconnected London with a murder investigation but spreads out to cover the lives of a Greek banker and mathematician who is almost eaten by a shark, an ancient alchemist, an Ethiopian painter, a video-game designer, a distributed future consciousness, and more and more until the resulting story covers 20 centuries, a dozen lives and topics as varied as love, death and traffic flow patterns."