This book was a collection of interconnected stories describing a dystopian city actively nearing the tipping point of a revolution. Yet rather than telling this story from the perspective of one single character, part of what makes The Ten Percent Thief so unique is that Lakshminarayan jumps between the perspectives of numerous distinct protagonists in this book's world. Essentially the book on the whole functions as a short story collection, with each individual story at first seeming separate from one another, but then as things continue, starting to build into a more complete narrative. An excerpt from the review I wrote is below:
Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s The Ten Percent Thief is an innovative work of fiction which I think could only ever be told as a sequence of interconnected short stories, rather than as a more traditionally structured novel. Set in the dystopian state of Apex City, the twenty stories of The Ten Percent Thief gradually piece together an expansive portrait of the sprawling far-future world in which the book is set—a technocratic meritocracy run by the corrupt organization known as Bell Corp (so named after the mathematically defined bell-curve from which this corporation models itself).
In all I thought The Ten Percent Thief was a fascinating novel/short story collection. The distributed nature of the book's narrative means that the plot progresses in a very nonlinear way, with points of commonality between each of this book's many characters only emerging gradually as the 20 stories in this collection slowly blur together. This ultimately allows Lakshminarayan to examine how there is never one single perspective on this novel's world that fully represents the truth of this dystopian society, even though every individual character in this book still has experiences of their city which are, in their own very specific way, valid.
The complete review can be read here.