Oh, I never cease to amuse myself with stupid puns as titles.

Anyway, this book is great. It's basically a set of short stories that tell one larger story. There's no main character, because almost every story shifts viewpoint, though characters do return regularly, which helps prevent a sense of dislocation.

The first story is that of a hair carpet-maker and his son. The carpet-makers spend their entire lifetime making a single carpet of human hair, for the palace of the emperor, or so they believe. The real story of why they are making the carpets, where the carpets go, and so on is the novel's real story, and it's quite compelling.

There's a lot of great ideas in here, but there's also real characters. I loved how the stories expand out from a single character in a single town to an inter-galactic empire.

This book is a rare thing, a translation of non-Engish SF&F into English. I hope it sells well and more of Eschbach's work becomes available. This is actually his first novel, and it's over ten years old, so there's plenty of back catalog available.