Matter by Iain M Banks

I really enjoyed this novel. The cover blurb calls it a Culture novel, but really it's about people on a low tech world, with only one main character part of the Culture (and she came from the same world as the others originally anyway).

The story explores the place of the low tech people in Banks' galaxy, driven along by a plot about local politics and some machinations of other factions that are intertwined with it.

One other major plus is that it didn't have any of the kind of fascinated description of horrific acts that many of his earlier stories did.