When Miles is called home, he is not looking forward to facing Simon Illyan’s fury, and the end result is even worse than being designated to desk duty. To make matters even worse, Miles deliberately hid this issue from his superior officer at Imperial Security, fearing he’d be stuck behind a desk instead of allowed out into the field. As is typical of Miles’s luck they appear at the worst possible moment, much to the detriment of the poor lieutenant. Unfortunately, resurrection is a procedure that has some side effects – and in Miles’s case, they happen to manifest in the middle of the operation to save the lieutenant. As can be imagined, the Emperor and the rest of the Barrayaran government didn’t take too kindly to this treatment of one of their men, thus resulting in dispatching a crew to rescue him. Instead of doing the intelligent thing and returning poor Lieutenant Vorberg to his homeland, they decided to put him up for sale. This time Simon Illyan, chief of Imperial Security, has charged Miles with retrieving a courier taken when hijackers took over a freighter.

Miles Vorkosigan is once again on a mission in his guise as Admiral Miles Naismith, commander of the Dendarii Fleet.

It is a series I highly recommend to fans of space opera adventure, especially if you like a clever main character with a tendency to get into trouble. If you haven’t read the previous books and do not want to read potential spoilers, here are the reviews for both omnibuses that are good starting points for the series – Cordelia’s Honor and Young Miles. It picks up shortly after Mirror Dance and it is a transitional book for Miles as a character – familiarity with him is necessary to get the full impact of this novel. Other than the newly released Cryoburn, Memory is the only book not available in an omnibus.Īlthough I think it is possible to start the series with either the prequels ( Shards of Honor and Barrayar in Cordelia’s Honor) or The Warrior’s Apprentice (available in the Young Miles omnibus), I would definitely recommend reading all the books including Miles before beginning Memory. It may seem odd to include the latter two, but they are still in the series omnibus editions along with the other books so I’ve been reading them as they show up (one is about a member of Miles’s crew and the other takes place 200 years before Miles’s time – the latter shows up at the end of the omnibus editions, though, so I haven’t yet read it). That is, it’s tenth in chronological order beginning with the prequels about Miles’s parents and including the books that do not feature Miles. Memory is the tenth book out of fourteen total in the Miles Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold. A brief note on the Vorkosigan books before I get into Memory:

Memory bujold