Book was a four-book series that told one continuous story; it was one work in multiple volumes, and has been reprinted in a single volume more than once since then. The Urth of the New Sun was a single novel, slightly longer than the constituent parts of Book, originally published about five years after the end of Book. But - and here I should point out that there's always something quirky about a Wolfe project, often multiple things - the quirky thing about Urth, or one of them, is that it too tends to fall into four distinct sections.
The narrator and hero of Book, Severian - once an apprentice torturer, now Autarch of the most extensive country on his very far-future Earth - spends Urth in a journey to save his planet, that very old-SF hero's journey. Urth starts on a vast starship - made of wood, with immense solar sails, for maximum Wolfean past-as-future frisson - then moves to the planet Yesod in another universe (or perhaps the universe is named Yesod; Wolfe is rarely interested in being clear) where Severian is tested, and then there's a voyage back on the same ship and a final section on Urth.
There's quite a lot of vaguely described time travel along the way: this unnamed ship voyages in both time and space, so the back half of the novel in particular bounces through multiple time periods of Earth/Urth - and, if you follow Wolfe, also Ushas, the new name of the planet once it is "saved."
To put what Wolfe says vaguely in fantasy-coded language into something more clearly science-fictional: it is very far in the future and the Sun is very old and dim. Other stars are visible during the day; winters get longer and colder almost year-by-year. The Sun's collapse is imminent enough to be plausible within a human timescale. Godlike beings - possibly AI, possibly a bio-engineered race - created by the human-like inhabitants of the previous universe (time-travel, remember, and a Penrosian cyclical universe model) are willing to drop a white hole into the Sun, which would rejuvenate it.
But they will only do so if the leader of Urth comes to their planet and goes through a test - at least one Autarch before Severian has taken that journey and failed. Testing leaders of planets seems to be their major industry; we see, from the air, a vast archipelago of islands, each one devoted to testing the leaders of one particular galaxy. And dropping the "white fountain" into the Sun will massively disrupt the current Urth, killing possibly a majority of the people living there. There's no hint of trying to warn them or create bulwarks against the rising seas, despite the fact that the journey of the white hole into the Sun takes at least centuries. Wolfe, as always, has a devout right-wing Catholic's disdain for mere individual human lives.
As usual in a Wolfe novel, the main character is confused and ill-informed, despite insisting repeatedly that he's super-competent and (in this particular case) that he never forgets anything. There are long conversations about the nature of reality and the SFnal underpinnings of this world, all very carefully phrased in such a way such that that none of it is clear to the reader in terms that reader already knows. That's how Wolfe works: if you're not willing to do most of the work yourself - if you don't think of a SF novel as a combination of a British crossword and an acrostic - Wolfe is not the writer for you.
In this novel in particular, most of the charms and interest are in getting additional details about characters and events from Book - but, again, all couched in Wolfean triple-reverse terms, at best allusive and often just gestures in the direction a solution might, possibly, be deduced if you think about everything in the world exactly the way Wolfe did circa 1986.
It's full of interesting moments and arresting images; for all my snark, this is actually on the accessible side of Wolfe's corpus. It would help if you had read, or even better intensely studied Book of the New Sun very soon before reading Urth, but it's not, strictly speaking, necessary. There is a novel here, with characters and events, and Wolfe, at this point in his career, would connect those events into a consistent plot that could be followed with only a normal amount of attention.
Urth is not the triumph Book was; there are multiple times when it threatens to become even more of a Christian allegory than it already is, and it's inherently a secondary, derivative work to begin with, a book explaining how something we knew would happen did happen. But it's a solid, deeply inventive book by one of the best and most distinctive SF writers of his era, and a return to his best-loved and most popular world.
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