A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (4.5 stars)

Referred by a friend who said if I liked The Traitor Baru Cormorant, and I did, then I'd really like this one. He was right! In fact, I discovered a name for this genre of competent people doing great work that's usually invisible: bureaucracy porn. As Alexander von der Linden put it in an amazon review: "Give me competent people competently running a ship, or a government, or a military unit, or a trading house. Give me the minutiae. Let me see how the character interacts with other characters to solve problems." 

YES! This is what I want. The west wing in space, but not just politics and government, give me an industry I know nothing about and do a deep-dive within a fictional framework.

Anyway, this novel delivers a political game-of-thrones power struggle for an alien planet whose culture is significantly defined by poetry. There's some interesting alien tech, called an imago, but it comes with significant problems that mean our protagonist has to get by without it for a large part of the novel.

Martine delivers a great political maneuvering thriller between different factions as viewed by an outsider who needs to negotiate a complex geo-political and personal landscape from a weak position. There's a good amount of action in the form of assassinations and uprisings to keep things interesting, although it felt a little under-described in some places.

Apparently the author leaned heavily on her knowledge of Byzantine history and politics to build the plot and power struggle, of which I know nothing, but it certainly felt very real and plausible. Considerable effort went into world building: linguistics, naming, poetry, political factions.

Some minor quibbles and slight spoilers: 

• Mahit really should have lost the imago given how many knew where it was and were incentivized to steal it. 
• I wish we had some more time with both personalities in the same body, there was a lot of interesting potential for plot lines there that didn't get enough airtime. 
• The poetry encryption was ridiculous in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness, as was the physical USB-stick thingys with wax seals for communication in a very advanced space-travelling, AI-heavy society.
• The pronunciation guide is both incredibly detailed and useless. I don't want to figure out how to say things from first principles given the linguistic rules for each letter/syllable, just tell me how to pronounce Teixcalaanli and a handful of other common words.

Very deserving of the Hugo.

4.5 stars.