The Thousand Earths
Stephen Baxter excels at the “long view” and mind-expanding ideas and these skills are on display here. I would class this an “artifact” SF novel, the artifact in this case being one of a thousand inhabited flat mega-structures known as plates. There a couple of parallel story lines but the one involving the refugees and their depredation on their travels did drag and I wanted to skip bits. Especially since the “artifact” premise was explained about half-way through so the rather relentless description of suffering had a rather limited story payback since we knew if was all rather unnecessary. Still, a nice stand-alone from Stephen but not one I could see myself re-reading.