Perdido Street Station

"Compulsively readable." The Washington Post Book World
"A work of exhaustive inventiveness ... superlative fantasy" Time Out
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.
PRAISE FOR CHINA MIEVILLE
"[Mieville s] wit dazzles, his humour is lively, and the pure vitality of his imagination is astonishing." Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian (on Three Moments of an Explosion)
"Dark and thought-provoking." The San Diego Union-Tribune (on The City & The City)
"Richly conceived." The New York Times Book Review (on Embassytown)
"Mieville more than delivers." San Francisco Chronicle (on Kraken)