Across the globe, millions of computer screens flicker with the artfully coded world of T’Rain – an addictive internet role-playing game of fantasy and adventure. But backstreet hackers in China have just unleashed a contagious virus called Reamde, and as it rampages through the gaming world spreading from player to player – holding hard drives hostage in the process – the computer of one powerful and dangerous man is infected, causing the carefully mediated violence of the on-line world to spill over into reality.

A fast-talking, internet-addicted mafia accountant is brutally silenced by his Russian employers, and Zula – a talented young T’Rain computer programmer – is abducted and bundled on to a private jet. As she is flown across the skies in the company of the terrified boyfriend she broke up with hours before, and a brilliant Hungarian hacker who may be her only hope, she finds herself sucked into a whirl of Chinese Secret Service agents and gun-toting American Survivalists; the Russian criminal underground and an al-Qaeda cell led by a charismatic Welshman; each a strand of a connected world that devastatingly converges in T’Rain.

An inimitable and compelling thriller that careers from British Columbia to South-West China via Russia and the fantasy world of T’Rain, Reamde is an irresistible epic from the unique imagination of one of today’s most individual writers.

The audiobook version of “Reamde” is more than thirty-four hours long, and I still regretted reaching the end.

Malcolm Hillgartner delivers a masterful performance that kept me engaged throughout.

The opening chapter of REAMDE reads like something from John Irving or Richard Russo. It establishes Richard Forthrast, online wargame billionaire and former smuggler, in the context of his Iowa farming clan family, which spans the American spectrum from “American Taliban” Freemen, living off the grid, through Vietnam vets working the farms, to Zula, Richard’s adopted Eritrean niece.

The home team here is American in all its flavours, but the game is played, both online and in real life, on a global stage, stretching through Canada, China, and the Philippines, with characters from Russia, the UK (a half-Chinese British spy, a Scottish fraudster and a black Welsh Jihadist), Hungary, and China.

The plot is complex but clear. Its twists and turns are driven as much by the characters as it is by the underlying situation.

The themes are rich and rewarding: the links between the cyberworld and real life, the nature of money and power, the clash of cultures between the West and the rest, the power of friendship, the limitations of money and the value of honour in uncertain times.

Richard Forthrast is in his fifties. He’s lived long enough to make parts of the cyberpunk fantasy imagined in Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” (published in 1992, two years before the World Wide Web was born) into a reality and is now living with the consequences..

The book is named after a computer virus that preys on people in the real world and makes them pay up in Cyberspace (shades of Bitcoin here), starting a real-world hunt for the hackers that spirals out into ever-increasing mayhem.

The action scenes are crisp and focused. The sense of place is strong. The people are believable.

In the end, I wondered if the online game was really so important to it all. Then I slapped my forehead, gave the obligatory Simpson’s “Duh!” and realised that that was, perhaps, Stephenson’s main message: of all the kinds of reality that are out there, the one that matters most is the one where you do anything you have to to make those you love safe.