Perdido Street Station

The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at the centre of its own bewildering world. Humans and mutants and arcane races throng in the gloom beneath its chimneys, where the rivers are sluggish with unnatural effluent, and factories and foundries pound into the night. For a thousand years, the parliament and its brutal militia have ruled 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 something unthinkable is released. Soon the city is gripped by an alien terror - and the fate of millions depends on a clutch of outcasts alone on the run from lawmakers and crime-lords alike. And a reckoning is due at the city’s heart, in the vast edifice of Perdido Street Station. A nightmare has arrived and it is too late to escape.