Book description
The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at the centre of its own
bewildering world. Humans and mutants and arcane races throng the gloom
beneath its chimneys, where the rivers are sluggish with unnatural
effluent, and factories and foundries pound into the night. For more
than a thousand years, the parliament and its brutal militia have ruled
over a vast array of workers and artists, spies, magicians, junkies and
whores. Now a stranger has come, with a pocketful of gold and an
impossible demand, and inadvertently something unthinkable is released.
Soon the city is gripped by an alien terror - and the fate of millions
depends on a clutch of outcasts on the run from lawmakers and
crime-lords alike. The urban nightscape becomes a hunting ground as
battles rage in the shadows of bizarre buildings. And a reckoning is due
at the city's heart, in the vast edifice of Perdido Street Station. It
is too late to escape. 'A work of exhaustive inventiveness...superlative
fantasy' Time Out 'A well-written, authentically engrossing adventure
story, exuberantly full of hocus-pocus... Mieville does not disappoint'
Daily Telegraph
