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This is the second book in Erikson's "Malazan Book of the Fallen" series, and considered by many to be the best of the five published so far, according to some review browsing I've done on dejagoogle. I haven't read them all, of course, but I can readily believe that this one will be one of my faves, too.
It's definitely a few notches above "Gardens of the Moon". In Vol. 2, Erikson maintains the strengths from that first book: a dirty, gritty, real-feeling universe, complex political situations that stem from a deep, complicated backstory, and characters who deal with the world like real people...just getting by the best they can under impossible situations. But he also avoids some of the excesses of the previous volume. In Book 1, the reader was often left floundering with the sheer quantity of important characters and situations...and just when you'd gotten a grasp of one setting after 100 pages or so, the author picked you up and dropped you into an equally important situation that you had to learn all over again. It was pretty daunting. Book 2 still has a lot of characters and a lot of complexity, but the author wisely sticks with only a handful of main viewpoint characters, and moves around between them frequently enough that you never forget what was going on in any of the individual subplots.
And the subplots themselves are all much more clearly entwined among the main plot. The story tells of how each of our viewpoint characters ends up getting involved with an explosive desert rebellion. Not all of them are directly involved in the rebellion, but all of them wind up in the desert and having to deal with the situation in one way or another, with their actions often indirectly affecting other main characters along the way.
Overall, the book was a great read...one of the meatiest, most enjoyable "big fat fantasy" novels I've read in a long time.
It's definitely a few notches above "Gardens of the Moon". In Vol. 2, Erikson maintains the strengths from that first book: a dirty, gritty, real-feeling universe, complex political situations that stem from a deep, complicated backstory, and characters who deal with the world like real people...just getting by the best they can under impossible situations. But he also avoids some of the excesses of the previous volume. In Book 1, the reader was often left floundering with the sheer quantity of important characters and situations...and just when you'd gotten a grasp of one setting after 100 pages or so, the author picked you up and dropped you into an equally important situation that you had to learn all over again. It was pretty daunting. Book 2 still has a lot of characters and a lot of complexity, but the author wisely sticks with only a handful of main viewpoint characters, and moves around between them frequently enough that you never forget what was going on in any of the individual subplots.
And the subplots themselves are all much more clearly entwined among the main plot. The story tells of how each of our viewpoint characters ends up getting involved with an explosive desert rebellion. Not all of them are directly involved in the rebellion, but all of them wind up in the desert and having to deal with the situation in one way or another, with their actions often indirectly affecting other main characters along the way.
Overall, the book was a great read...one of the meatiest, most enjoyable "big fat fantasy" novels I've read in a long time.