On Saudade, anything is possible. Find yourself a new body, a new self. Buy a vintage Cadillac; be a vintage Cadillac. Have your flowers modified to smell of chocolate, or remodel your home to resemble a lighthouse. And if you're truly adventurous, you'll walk to the end of the worn cobblestones of the Baltic Exchange, out over the Lots and into the event zone, a fragment of the Kefahuchi Tract that fell from space years ago a surreal "hypermarket of the meaningless" where even Saudade's few rules cease to apply. But to get there and back you'd better have a guide, preferably a hardened old hand who knows the lie of the land; someone like Vic Serotonin. You'll find him in the tired gloom of the Black Cat White Cat bar, drinking the night away with a man they call Fat Antoyne.

To his fans, M. John Harrison numbers among the giants, not just of science fiction, but of modern literature. And in Nova Swing, his cool command of mood and setting makes such acclaim all the more plausible. There is much to appreciate in American literature; the taut, sometimes grim, often bitter tradition of Noir for one. That Englishman Harrison can take Noir, the creation of Hammett, Chandler and Ellroy, transport it thousands of light-years and graft it seamlessly onto an alien environment, makes him a writer to note.

The scarred, weary but tellingly real characters of Harrison's eighth novel lift it well above the norm and, for this reviewer, sustained a sometimes difficult read. Saudade is remote in both time and space and, for its inhabitants, quantum mechanics is the unexceptional foundation of routine lifestyle manipulations. The narrative voice (third-person omniscient) expects the same casual acceptance of this precept from the reader as it generates from its characters, and so it takes effort to visualise Saudade from the text. Reading Light, Harrison's earlier novel, may help.

I kept reading. The denouement has warmth, compassion and generosity and I'll remember Liv Hula, the melancholy owner of Black Cat White Cat, for a long time.

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