Ten-Percent Thief (2023)

Apex City sorts people by measures of productivity, pushing those who fail towards exclusion from the systems that make ordinary life possible. Lakshminarayan’s linked stories move between the favoured Virtuals and the dispossessed Analogs, making an apparently objective ranking feel like a whole city’s governing ideology. Choose it for the work of maintaining a desirable public image and the costs hidden beneath it. This is a mosaic novel, with deliberately changing voices rather than one continuous viewpoint.