The Summer's Best Read Is About AI, Surveillance, and Tiny Aliens

A novice police officer assigned to watch over a refugee group tries to figure out whether the refugees have been framed for terrorism--and where the real killers are lurking. Technically, this is an accurate description of the plot of David Musgrave's debut novel, Lambda. Sounds like a pretty straightforward potboiler, right? But from its first page, Lambda is up to something weirder and more unwieldy, ditching a linear narrative and setting the story in an alternate-universe Britain where you can get in trouble with the cops for damaging a talking toothbrush. In Lambda's bizarro-world 2019, advances have been made in artificial intelligence to the point that "sentient objects" have been granted rights, including said toothbrush, aka the ToothFriendIV.