Ingray is a likeable heroine, but not a terribly remarkable one.

It leans heavily on the likeability of its protagonist to carry the reader through the ins and outs of its arcane social protocols, treaty terms and legal shenanigans. Provenance is intricately, if linearly and rather shallowly, plotted. Her scheming brother is only too happy to exploit her disadvantage, and she quickly gets tangled up in both family power politics and more dangerous galactic treaty negotiations between potentially ferocious alien species.

Having spent all her money on the jailbreak, Ingray is now poor, something for which her privileged upbringing has not prepared her. Pahlad’s crime is the alleged theft of certain venerated historical artefacts, the recovery of which, Ingray hopes, will secure valuable social status for her. Instead we have Ingray, an aristocratic young woman from the Hwae system, who borrows money against her future inheritance to pay for an individual called Pahlad Budrakim to be smuggled out of “Compassionate Removal”, the euphemistic name for a rather horrible prison planet. The novel is set in the same Radchaai universe as Leckie’s debut trilogy, although it doesn’t directly continue Breq’s story.

It turns out that Provenance is a thoroughly decent science fiction novel that is readable, absorbing and ever so slightly so whatish. Expectations for Leckie’s new novel are at fever pitch, which makes me wonder if a degree of anticlimax, deserved or otherwise, is almost inevitable. Success on this scale, though, can put a writer in an unenviable position. Two sequels – Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy – carried Breq’s story to its conclusion, expanding Leckie’s imaginary universe in pleasingly Iain M Banksy ways, and Leckie found herself propelled, in short order, to the front of the genre. All characters are referred to by female pronouns because the Radchaai don’t distinguish gender: a simple but surprisingly effective strategy for disorienting readerly preconception. Leckie does not deny her readers the satisfaction of adventure, intrigue and space battles, but she puts those things at the service of some richly rendered observations on the difference between loyalty and obedience, service and slavery.

Ann leckie provenance review