Following the success of his award-winning novel River of Gods, British science fiction writer Ian McDonald has once again produced an ultra-rich mix of complex concepts, wild action and dazzling prose, underpinned by an impressive depth of knowledge of the culture in which the story is set.

Brasyl is made up of three separate story threads, alternating chapter by chapter. Linkages appear few at first, but shadowy figures with mysterious agendas soon appear in all of the strands. These dangerous intruders wreak havoc with terrifying weapons called Q-blades, which exploit the strange concepts of quantum physics to "wound space-time".

In the first strand of the book, set in Rio de Janeiro in 2006, we follow Marcelina, an ambitious reality TV producer. Her idea for a new show is a trial-by-public of the man all Brazil blames for losing the 1950 World Cup soccer game. As she searches for him, her life is systematically destroyed by a mysterious intruder who looks just like her.

The second thread, set in 2030s Sao Paolo, follows a hustling young entrepreneur called Edson, who is thrown into the dangerous world of backstreet quantum computing. There's a budding romance, which is complicated by more Q-bladewielding intruders and another apparent simulacrum.

The Brazil of the third narrative is stranger still. In 1732, Irish Jesuit Luis Quinn is sent up the Amazon river to investigate the suspicious activities of a priest who has established a heretical empire in the heart of the country. When he is forced to take a bizarre drug, his mind begins to operate on a quantum level.

As with all classic science fiction, Brasyl explores the wildest implications of quantum mechanics – entanglement, parallel universes and the like – and weaves them into the fabric of the story.