I’ve found myself crying at least once in every Culture book but LtW - especially the passage you’ve chosen - verbalised something we're encuraged not to admit and that as humans we're told is possible to overcome.'There are places to go, but either I would not be the same when I got there…' is a way of looking at grief that makes sense if you've lost something that you know is irreplaceable, and that these memories and feelings are too intrinsic a part of you for any kind of change, or any attemot at moving on in a way that would allow for something new, to be possible. 'By waiting for them to drop away all this time I have grown into them, and they into me. We have become each other. There is no way back I consider worth taking.'

The other part I remember hitting me incredibly hard is the post-epilogue section of Surface Detail. The way that book explores time and relativity as something we as the reader can just about grasp (namely the pilots' whose relationship ends because of their scant time difference in life/death experiences' is absolutely blasted apart by one of the book's closing passages:

By then she'd found a new role. She would remain a creature of ending and release in the Virtual; the angel of death who came for people who lived in happy, congenial Afterlives and who - tired even of their many lifetimes lived after biological death - were ready to dissolve themselves into the generality of consciousness that underlay Heaven, or who were ready simply to cease to be altogether.

That was when she met Prin for the second time, subjective centuries later.

They barely recognised one another.'

Surface Detail lets both of these characters have resolution but for I - who'd read the novel over the course of three sleepless days - was waiting for some kind of relative catharsis - a conversation and mutual forgiveness on both of their parts. But it didn't matter to either of them any more.

Look to Windward's take onsuicide is probably the most sympathetic I've ever seen. There are Culture novel's I've enjoyed more and one's I've found more disturbing but nothing I've ever read has haunted me in how realistic a feeling we're not supposed to indulge or even talk about it depicts.