Every culture has a dark side to it that history in the beginning tries hard to keep it alive. With time people change, mutating the history along with them and they start to co-exist. Years later it becomes a difficult task to find beginning of a notion or a change that is now severely impacting the present. 
 Its a journey of a spy, Shara, who at her heart is a curious historian who wants to know more about the continent her country has defeated in war. Like every war, there have been consequences to it which has brought the major city to its knees. Her ancestor is the one who has defeated the divinities or Godly beings who are capable of miracles. The divinities once prospered the continent with their presence and accumulated followers who agreed with the agenda. 
 It all changed when Shara's ancestor killed the divinities and the country, Saypur, took over the continent. What happens next is cultural oppression - denying knowledge and history to the people it belongs to, removing traces of culture from the cities and regulating resources that get in and out of the city. 
 People meddle. And when someone rises against it - however insane or dangerous the retribution is, they wonder why. Bennett writes a wonderful contradiction into his characters; Shara is miserable for unable to go home for sixteen years yet she doesn't understand people's misery for unable to know about their ancestors. The story unravels the history of the city and the war in a way the reader's perspective keep shifting and maintains an organic argument throughout the book. Bennett carefully crafts the plot to make every argument flawed, every character damnable and every change that is taking place - a city re-discovering itself. The story comes in layers with each layer adding a dimension to the plot, the city and the characters while a technicality gets unveiled. A philosophical note clings to the notes that offer a great insight to the history. 
 The book serves as a sociocultural study of a society slowly degrading with expansion, greed and consumed with power. A dystopian view of its future, the continent is unrecognizable in the way it stands on top of forgotten history and buried knowledge. As a society, it is in war with itself - a generation that can only reminisce about past glory and a newer generation that has grown up without knowledge of the past. Its a cauldron brewing a change that would change the world when the time came. 
 Power and corruption lurks in the fringes of our dictum. While one country wanted to overthrow everything in their way to expanding their continent, the other harbored a primal hatred that constituted in thousands dying. Its an endless cycle of people hurting each other for the positions they find themselves in. Shara finds herself doing bidding of her powerful aunt while she desires something else entirely. She trudges through this contradiction, finds herself in the brink of losing everything she has cared for and what she believed to be real. 
 I love this book. Bennett doesn't paint the world in black and white. He writes about the flaws in argument, the mutable nature of human ambition and the cost of subjugation and oppression comes. There is no good side or bad side in this book. The writer keeps them both at an arms length when he writes their motives and their actions. The ending isn't so much of an ending as it is a beginning. Bennett touches several historical references; Moghul India is glaringly similar in some places. 
 Knowledge, indeed, is power.