–Won’t you at least tell me which one I was in that life? I demand insistently. –So I know which lesson I’m supposed to have learned? Was I Hero? The king? The wasp?
…Yes, grandmother says. –You were those people, and everybody else besides, and the wasps, and the trees and the rocks, too. Everyone else was also. What do you think is the border of you?

It’s that question of selfhood and its relationship to surroundings that Vajra Chandrasekera's novel Rakesfall revolves around. This book explores how the past stays with us and resistance springs eternal through a metafictional romp across spacetime.

Rakesfall could be quickly summarized as two souls chasing each other from an ancient empire of time-guardians across the European colonization of Sri Lanka and its civil war through Earth’s post-climate collapse ecological restoration through the end of time itself. They inhabit children on the cusp of adulthood and civil war, decaying and animated corpses wandering a city where all doors stay open, trans cyborgs investigating murders among the last humans on Earth, and time-traveling witches spear-phishing. At any point in time, the plot can jump worlds, millennia, and even genre–the story seesaws from retelling of Sanskrit epics to anecdotes about the history of scientific racism.

The miracle of Rakesfall instantiates in its navigation of these deep time gaps. The mood flickers from tense to grieving to furious to weary, but never resigned. Even amid brutal Dutch and English colonialism and the carnage of civil war, Rakesfall shows humor: a story-within-a-story explains a “great famine” as “probably because of Winston Churchill the long-tongued devil of hunger,” wryly lampooning the architect of the horrific Bengal Famine of 1943. Indeed, the tone flips from flowery to irreverent within a scant two sentences:

Her every limb is adorned with ornaments finer than any in the palace of his king.
Oh Shit, the wrestler says, embarrassed and unsure. Ma’am, Whomst Art Thou?

The ornate and aged early modern English words weave in and out with the crude and contemporary in a way that shows both the age of these stories and their renewable pathos. Such techniques ensure that even where it’s not readily apparent which perspective is at hand or what will come next, the reader follows the action intimately at a stolid, loping pace.

Rakesfall challenges the reader in almost every way possible, and that’s why it ought to be in your consideration. Words sometimes run into each other without spaces, phrases often foreshadow distantly related events, and rare short sections muse on the nature of stories without clearly referencing the protagonists. All these techniques remind us that “you and I are a we right here and now.” Whether “we like it or not,” Rakesfall shows, we are all entangled in the messy web of our continuous histories and closed stories. And as far as stories go, one where the protagonists are those who strive against the cruel whims of hierarchy are always thought-provoking. I could spend hours writing about this book's themes, ranging from the grounding of its deep time drama in ecology to the commentary on the distinction between the historical record and fiction. But like the protagonists of its stories, “in every world, I’ll look for the revolution,” and I’ll be looking through Rakesfall for years to come.