book cover of Embassytown
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Embassytown

(2011)
A novel by

 
 
Awards
Arthur C. Clarke Award Best Book (nominee)
Hugo Best Novel (nominee)
John W Campbell Memorial Award Best Novel (nominee)
Nebula Awards Best Novel (nominee)
China Miéville doesn't follow trends, he sets them. Relentlessly pushing his own boundaries as a writer - and in the process expanding the boundaries of the entire field - with Embassytown, Miéville has crafted an extraordinary novel that is not only a moving personal drama but a gripping adventure of alien contact and war.

In the far future, humans have colonized a distant planet, home to the enigmatic Ariekei, sentient beings famed for a language unique in the universe, one that only a few altered human ambassadors can speak.

Avice Benner Cho, a human colonist, has returned to Embassytown after years of deep-space adventure. She cannot speak the Ariekei tongue, but she is an indelible part of it, having long ago been made a figure of speech, a living simile in their language.

When distant political machinations deliver a new ambassador to Arieka, the fragile equilibrium between humans and aliens is violently upset. Catastrophe looms, and Avice is torn between competing loyalties - to a husband she no longer loves, to a system she no longer trusts, and to her place in a language she cannot speak yet speaks through her.

Genre: Science Fiction

Praise for this book

"A fully achieved work of art." - Ursula K Le Guin

"One of the most interesting and promising writers to appear in the last few years in any genre." - Carlos Ruiz Zafón


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