Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville

Miéville’s magnum opus, Perdido Street Station, is a magnificent tour de force of imagination, a grand experience in which the reader’s reality gets sublimated into the complete, fantastically detailed, spell-binding world of New Crobuzon and its inhabitants. All 710 wonderful, engrossing pages of it. Again, the descriptions so gripped me that I felt I could see, in my mind, “Yagharek”, the Garuda, who had had his wings cut from his back, “Lin”, the Khepri artist, who sculpts with her own spit; “Isaac”, the lumbering scientist with wildly teetering emotions, the “Weaver”, who snips and weaves dreams and reality for the sake of beauty; the slake-moths, with their hypnotic wings; and all the weird and wonderful imaginings of China Miéville’s prodigious and astonishingly creative mind. (Continue reading…)