Revelation Space 
Sylveste is the only man ever to return alive and sane from a Shroud, an enclave in space protected by awesome gravity-warping defenses: "a folding a billion times less severe should have required more energy than was stored in the entire rest-mass of the galaxy." Now an intuition he doesn't understand makes him explore the dead world Resurgam, whose birdlike natives long ago tripped some booby trap that made their own sun erupt in a deadly flare.
Meanwhile, the vast, decaying lightship Nostalgia for Infinity is coming for Sylveste, whose dead father (in AI simulation) could perhaps help the Captain, frozen near absolute zero yet still suffering monstrous transformation by nanotech plague. Most of Infinity's tiny crew have hidden agendas--Khouri the reluctant contract assassin believes she must kill Sylveste to save humanity--and there are two bodiless stowaways, one no longer human and one never human. Shocking truths emerge from bluff, betrayal, and ingenious lies.
The trail leads to a neutron star where an orbiting alien construct has defenses to challenge the Infinity's planet-wrecking superweapons.
At the heart of this artifact, the final revelations detonate--most satisfyingly. Dense with information and incident, this longish novel has no surplus fat and seems almost too short. A sparkling SF debut. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk
Reviews
The author borrows heavily from several different sources. I didn't find any original ideas in this book. All in all a huge disappointment. Don't waste your money or your time.
The problem with this book is that it reads like it's the second in a series - not the first. There's so much back story that's left untold that I found myself scratching my head at the end of each section. The author references Pattern Jugglers and Shrouders and something sinister between them and the main character, Sylveste, but leaves them unexplained. This, in addition to Sylveste's apparent, yet unelaborated, physical anomalies.
Regarding the main character, Sylveste - here's a man who has an obvious physical deformity incurred during a "razorstorm" (prior to the beginning of the book) which ruined his eyes and forced their replacement. Yet there's no description provided. All the other characters acknowledge it but the reader is left wondering - are they mechanical? Organic, but some odd color? What? What makes them notable? Is he scarred? Some mystery surrounding the main characters is healthy but the author crossed the line between vagueness and outright obfuscation.
With each section and accompanying main character I was trying not only to acclimate to a universe 500 years in the future but also to these very complex characters with intricate subplots and backgrounds. Then, when the author has given you the briefest of glimpses of the character and you've accumulated a bunch of questions regarding him or her, you're shuttled to a different character and the process is repeated and more questions raised and stored. It proved too difficult for me to get into and I ended up putting the book down unfinished.
What I liked best was the sweep and ambition of the story. The final section, once you see where all this has been heading, is intensely dramatic. The science was also interesting and done well, to be expected since the author is a professional scientist.
However, the opening sections are slow and confusing; I didn't really get into the story until page 150 or so. And the various conspiracies in the book are rather too convoluted; all of these characters seem to have hidden agendas inside of their hidden agendas. The prose style was competent, but not really up to keeping the reader engrossed in a story of such length and complexity.
Reynolds has the tools, if he works on his weak points, to do something really special. Fortunately the sequel, which I'm about halfway through at this point, is looking like an improvement.