Perdido Street Station

For more than a thousand years, the parliament and its brutal militia have ruled over a vast array of workers, spies, magicians, and junkies. Now a stranger has come with an impossible demand, and inadvertently something unthinkable is released. A reckoning is due and it is too late to escape.

Genre: Science Fiction

"China Mieville's cool style has conjured up a triumphantly macabre technoslip metropolis with a unique atmosphere of horror and fascination. A kind of imaginary world you pray stays imaginary, because we really don't need characters and stories this real finding a way to cross over." - Peter F Hamilton

"Energetic, thuggish, constantly inventive China Mieville continues his project of rebuilding fantasy from the sub cellar up. New Crobuzon, city of clockwork engine and subterranean punishment factory, has the architectonics of a living thing. It is a site of elation, dispute, danger and change: a city raucous with dreams." - M John Harrison

"...something very special indeed. At 700 pages it's not to be taken lightly, but I defy anyone to stop once they've allowed themselves to be drawn into the amazing, intricate and grotesque world he has created." - Alastair Reynolds

"A phantasmagoric masterpiece whose grotesquerie is unmatched by any other work of contempory imaginative fiction. Its surreal imagery recalls the work of Hieronymus Bosch, and only a writer ov the very highest quality could bind such a hectic torrent of exotica into a plot as taut and compelling as this one." - Brian Stableford