I’d like to read Christopher Priest’s The Adjacent but I haven’t actually read any of his fiction (I know you can castigate me later).  Anywho Niall Alexander’s review on Strange Horizon – which I admit I only skimmed – says:

Reading The Adjacent is like taking a grand tour of the larger canon Christopher Priest has established over the course of his forty-year career, so no, newcomers need not apply, but old hands are apt to find it massively satisfying: an exceptional effort which seems to complete, if not necessarily conclude, many of the themes and ideas the author has been dickering with, ever so cleverly, for decades.

Is this assessment accurate?  Would it be silly to read The Adjacent without having read his other novels?

And as a side note, is Baxter’s forthcoming book Proxima connected to any of his other series?