Listen free for 30 days
-
Perdido Street Station: New Crobuzon, Book 1
- Narrated by: Jonathan Oliver
- Series: New Crobuzon, Book 1
- Length: 31 hrs
- Categories: Science Fiction & Fantasy, Fantasy
People who bought this also bought...
-
Embassytown
- By: China Mieville
- Narrated by: Susan Duerden
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
China Miéville doesn’t follow trends, he sets them. Relentlessly pushing his own boundaries as a writer—and in the process expanding the boundaries of the entire field—with Embassytown, Miéville has crafted an extraordinary novel that is not only a moving personal drama but a gripping adventure of alien contact and war.
-
-
A bit of a corker
- By Nellig on 29-07-11
-
The City & The City
- By: China Mieville
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
New York Times best-selling author China Mieville delivers his most accomplished novel yet, an existential thriller set in a city unlike any other, real or imagined. When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlof the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have imagined.
-
-
Twice the city for your money
- By Nigel on 19-05-12
-
The Windup Girl
- By: Paolo Bacigalupi
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 19 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's Calorie Man in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history's lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko...Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. One of the New People, Emiko is not human; instead, she is an engineered being, creche-grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of a Kyoto businessman.
-
-
Great story - Narrator on Valium
- By David on 06-04-14
-
The Algebraist
- By: Iain M. Banks
- Narrated by: Geoff Annis
- Length: 24 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For short-lived races like humans, space is dominated by the complicated, grandiose Mercatoria. To the Dwellers who may live billions of years, the galaxy consists of their gas-giant planets - the rest is debris. Fassin Taak is a Slow Seer privileged to work with the Dwellers of the gas-giant Nasqueron. His work consists of rummaging for data in their vast, disorganised memories and libraries. Unfortunately, without knowing it, he's come close to an ancient secret of unimaginable importance.
-
-
Spoiled by awful narration
- By Martin on 05-12-17
-
Un Lun Dun
- By: China Mieville
- Narrated by: Karen Cass
- Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The iron wheel began to spin, slowly at first, then faster and faster. The room grew darker. As the light lessened, so did the sound. Deeba and Zanna stared at each other in wonder. The noise of the cars and vans and motorbikes outside grew tinny. The wheel turned off all the cars and turned off all the lamps. It was turning off London.... Zanna and Deeba are two girls leading ordinary lives, until they stumble into the world of UnLondun, an urban Wonderland where all the lost and broken things of London end up.
-
-
Teenagers in Neverwhere but uniquely appealing
- By Sarah on 19-06-13
-
Railsea
- By: China Mieville
- Narrated by: Tom Lawrence
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On board the moletrain Medes, Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe as he witnesses his first moldywarpe hunt. The giant mole bursting from the earth, the harpoonists targeting their prey, the battle resulting in one’s death and the other’s glory are extraordinary. But no matter how spectacular it is, travelling the endless rails of the railsea, Sham can't shake the sense that there is more to life.
-
-
Fascinating book
- By S Lambert on 14-10-18
-
Embassytown
- By: China Mieville
- Narrated by: Susan Duerden
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
China Miéville doesn’t follow trends, he sets them. Relentlessly pushing his own boundaries as a writer—and in the process expanding the boundaries of the entire field—with Embassytown, Miéville has crafted an extraordinary novel that is not only a moving personal drama but a gripping adventure of alien contact and war.
-
-
A bit of a corker
- By Nellig on 29-07-11
-
The City & The City
- By: China Mieville
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
New York Times best-selling author China Mieville delivers his most accomplished novel yet, an existential thriller set in a city unlike any other, real or imagined. When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlof the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have imagined.
-
-
Twice the city for your money
- By Nigel on 19-05-12
-
The Windup Girl
- By: Paolo Bacigalupi
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 19 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's Calorie Man in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history's lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko...Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. One of the New People, Emiko is not human; instead, she is an engineered being, creche-grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of a Kyoto businessman.
-
-
Great story - Narrator on Valium
- By David on 06-04-14
-
The Algebraist
- By: Iain M. Banks
- Narrated by: Geoff Annis
- Length: 24 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For short-lived races like humans, space is dominated by the complicated, grandiose Mercatoria. To the Dwellers who may live billions of years, the galaxy consists of their gas-giant planets - the rest is debris. Fassin Taak is a Slow Seer privileged to work with the Dwellers of the gas-giant Nasqueron. His work consists of rummaging for data in their vast, disorganised memories and libraries. Unfortunately, without knowing it, he's come close to an ancient secret of unimaginable importance.
-
-
Spoiled by awful narration
- By Martin on 05-12-17
-
Un Lun Dun
- By: China Mieville
- Narrated by: Karen Cass
- Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The iron wheel began to spin, slowly at first, then faster and faster. The room grew darker. As the light lessened, so did the sound. Deeba and Zanna stared at each other in wonder. The noise of the cars and vans and motorbikes outside grew tinny. The wheel turned off all the cars and turned off all the lamps. It was turning off London.... Zanna and Deeba are two girls leading ordinary lives, until they stumble into the world of UnLondun, an urban Wonderland where all the lost and broken things of London end up.
-
-
Teenagers in Neverwhere but uniquely appealing
- By Sarah on 19-06-13
-
Railsea
- By: China Mieville
- Narrated by: Tom Lawrence
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On board the moletrain Medes, Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe as he witnesses his first moldywarpe hunt. The giant mole bursting from the earth, the harpoonists targeting their prey, the battle resulting in one’s death and the other’s glory are extraordinary. But no matter how spectacular it is, travelling the endless rails of the railsea, Sham can't shake the sense that there is more to life.
-
-
Fascinating book
- By S Lambert on 14-10-18
-
Dawn
- Xenogenesis, Book 1
- By: Octavia E. Butler
- Narrated by: Aldrich Barrett
- Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a world devastated by nuclear war with humanity on the edge of extinction, aliens finally make contact. They rescue those humans they can, keeping most survivors in suspended animation while the aliens begin the slow process of rehabilitating the planet. When Lilith Iyapo is "awakened", she finds that she has been chosen to revive her fellow humans in small groups by first preparing them to meet the utterly terrifying aliens, then training them to survive on the wilderness that the planet has become. But the aliens cannot help humanity without altering it forever.
-
-
You'll root for the aliens
- By gary on 11-03-19
-
The Book of Koli
- The Rampart Trilogy, Book 1
- By: M. R. Carey
- Narrated by: Theo Solomon
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Beyond the walls of the small village of Mythen Rood lies an unrecognisable landscape. A place where overgrown forests are filled with choker trees and deadly seeds that will kill you where you stand. And if they don't get you, the Shunned men will. Koli has lived in Mythen Rood his entire life. He believes the first rule of survival is that you don't venture too far beyond the walls.
-
-
Looking forward to the next instalment
- By Lovemykindle on 27-05-20
-
The Dreaming Void
- By: Peter F. Hamilton
- Narrated by: Toby Longworth
- Length: 21 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
AD 3580. The Intersolar Commonwealth has spread through the galaxy to over a thousand star systems. It is a culture of rich diversity with a place for everyone. Even death itself has been overcome. But at the centre of the Commonwealth is a massive black hole. This Void is not a natural artefact. Inside there is a strange universe where the laws of physics are very different to those we know. It is slowly consuming the other stars of the galactic core - one day it will devour the entire galaxy.
-
-
Listen to this
- By Walter on 22-01-09
-
The Wandering Earth
- By: Cixin Liu
- Narrated by: Jeremy Domingo
- Length: 14 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Sun is dying. Earth will perish too, consumed by the star in its final death throes. But rather than abandon their planet, humanity builds 12,000 mountainous fusion engines to propel the Earth out of orbit and onto a centuries-long voyage to Proxima Centaurai....
-
-
Another epic story arc from Cixin Liu
- By Strayficshion on 02-08-19
-
Bear Head
- By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Narrated by: Laurence Bouvard, Nathan Osgood, William Hope
- Length: 12 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mars. The red planet. A new frontier for humanity: a civilisation where humans can live in peace, lord and master of all they survey. But this isn't Space City from those old science-fiction books. It's more like Hell City, built into and from a huge crater. There's a big silk canopy over it, feeding out atmosphere as we generate it, little by little, because we can't breathe the air here. I guess it's a perfect place to live, if you want to live on Mars. At some point I must have wanted to live on Mars, because here I am.
-
-
A fine sequel
- By paul sparks on 08-01-21
-
October
- The Story of the Russian Revolution
- By: China Mieville
- Narrated by: John Banks
- Length: 11 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The renowned fantasy and science fiction writer China Mieville has long been inspired by the ideals of the Russian Revolution, and here, on the centenary of the revolution, he provides his own distinctive take on its history. In February 1917, in the midst of bloody war, Russia was still an autocratic monarchy: nine months later it became the first socialist state in world history. How did this unimaginable transformation take place? How was a ravaged and backward country, swept up in a desperately unpopular war, rocked by not one but two revolutions?
-
-
not a book for audio - good to read only,
- By DLC on 11-12-17
-
Dark Eden
- By: Chris Beckett
- Narrated by: Oliver J. Hembrough, Jessica Martin
- Length: 13 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A marooned outpost of humanity struggles to survive on a startlingly alien world. John Redlantern, one of the 532 degenerating descendants of two marooned space explorers, will break the laws of Eden, shatter the Family and change history. He will be the first to abandon hope, the first to abandon the old ways, the first to kill another, the first to venture into the Dark, and the first to discover the truth about Eden....
-
-
Everything I look for in Science Fiction
- By M on 05-08-15
-
The Doors of Eden
- By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Narrated by: Sophie Aldred
- Length: 18 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Lee thought she’d lost Mal, but now she’s miraculously returned. But what happened that day on the moors? And where has she been all this time? Mal’s reappearance hasn’t gone unnoticed by MI5 officers either, and Lee isn’t the only one with questions. Julian Sabreur is investigating an attack on top physicist Kay Amal Khan. This leads Julian to clash with agents of an unknown power - and they may or may not be human. His only clue is grainy footage showing a woman who supposedly died on Bodmin Moor.
-
-
Super-woke Brexit allegory
- By Johari on 21-08-20
-
Cage of Souls
- By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Narrated by: David Thorpe
- Length: 23 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The sun is bloated, diseased, dying perhaps. Beneath its baneful light, Shadrapar, last of all cities, harbours fewer than 100,000 human souls. Built on the ruins of countless civilisations, Shadrapar is a museum, an asylum, a prison on a world that is ever more alien to humanity. Bearing witness to the desperate struggle for existence between life old and new is Stefan Advani: rebel, outlaw, survivor. This is his testament, an account of the journey that took him into the blazing desolation of the western deserts and into the labyrinths and caverns of the underworld.
-
-
Surprised by a good book
- By Matt on 22-06-19
-
Snow Crash
- By: Neal Stephenson
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 17 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Neal Stephenson is a blazing new force on the sci-fi scene. With the groundbreaking cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, he has "vaulted onto the literary stage." It weaves virtual reality, Sumerian myth, and just about everything in between with a cool, hip cybersensibility - in short, it is the gigathriller of the information age.
-
-
Lose yourself in another world
- By Lily the Pink on 26-09-15
-
The Fall of the Gas-Lit Empire
- The Complete Series
- By: Rod Duncan
- Narrated by: Gemma Whelan
- Length: 29 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The complete set of The Fall of the Gas-Lit Empire trilogy, featuring The Bullet Catcher's Daughter, Unseemly Science and The Custodian of Marvels. Elizabeth Barnabus lives a double life - as herself and as her brother, the private detective. She is trying to solve the mystery of a disappearing aristocrat and a hoard of arcane machines. In her way stand the rogues, freaks and self-proclaimed alchemists of a travelling circus....
-
-
Steampunk Adventuress rights wrongs
- By Andrew on 23-02-18
-
The Peripheral
- By: William Gibson
- Narrated by: Lorelei King
- Length: 14 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Peripheral by William Gibson is a thrilling new novel about two intertwined futures, from the bestselling author of Neuromancer. Flynne Fisher lives down a country road, in a rural near-future America where jobs are scarce, unless you count illegal drug manufacture, which she's keen to avoid. Her brother Burton lives, or tries to, on money from the Veterans Association, in compensation for neurological damage suffered in a Marines elite unit.
-
-
Somewhat disappointed
- By Doug on 01-08-16
Summary
Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies, junkies, and whores. In New Crobuzon, the unsavory deal is stranger to none—not even to Isaac, a brilliant scientist with a penchant for Crisis Theory.
Isaac has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research. But when a half-bird, half-human creature known as the Garuda comes to him from afar, Isaac is faced with challenges he has never before fathomed. Though the Garuda's request is scientifically daunting, Isaac is sparked by his own curiosity and an uncanny reverence for this curious stranger.
While Isaac's experiments for the Garuda turn into an obsession, one of his lab specimens demands attention: a brilliantly colored caterpillar that feeds on nothing but a hallucinatory drug and grows larger—and more consuming—by the day. What finally emerges from the silken cocoon will permeate every fiber of New Crobuzon—and not even the Ambassador of Hell will challenge the malignant terror it invokes.
Critic reviews
More from the same
Author
Narrator
What listeners say about Perdido Street Station: New Crobuzon, Book 1
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
- Will
- 31-01-12
Flawed. Overlong. Masterful.
This book badly needed a more authoritative editor. The description passages are far too long. The author uses words like "bathetic", "vertiginous" and "solipsistic" where they're not needed. Space spent on excessive detail could have been spent extending the ending, which is perfunctory and unsatisfying and does almost none of the main characters justice.
Why, then, have I given this verbose, poorly-ended book five stars? Because it's a thing of beauty. A truly unique fantasy work, breathtakingly creative and lovingly realised. It contains one of the most distinctive settings you're likely to find, one of the most genuinely affecting relationships I've experienced in speculative fiction, and some of the coolest characters and monsters anywhere. The world of Bas-Lag is brilliantly complete and endlessly surprising; dark and unpleasant yet fascinating. It's somewhere in between science fiction and fantasy (I would describe it as retrofuturist fantasy), and it's changed how I think about both. The plot, up until the last couple of hours, is coherent and engaging, and twists and turns with an unpredictability rarely seen. It's definitely political, but not excessively so. It's marvellous.
Sometimes a bad ending retroactively ruins the whole book, or film, or game, or at least permanently tarnishes your appreciation of it. Not here. When I finished this audiobook yesterday, I was annoyed at the ending, but I'm definitely glad I went along for the ride. Jonathan Oliver's narration fits the tone of the writing brilliantly. In places, it has an excess of drama to match the excess of verbosity, but when the writing is more measured the narration really shines, and his voices are great. I especially like the way he voices the non-human characters, particularly Lin.
I've never written a review for audible this long before, but I wanted to make my complex feelings known. If you like speculative fiction, Perdido Street Station offers something unique. Try it out!
34 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- J. Lennon
- 18-07-18
Great book, awful audio
This audiobook takes a wonderful story and delivers it in the manner of an angry Victorian headmaster. The ever present sibilance is like someone spitting in your ears. Sounds like it was recording by a dribbling sociopath locked in a cupboard with a dictaphone. Bad delivery and bad production rendering one of my all time favourite books unlistenable.
5 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Martin
- 21-05-13
Slough of pugnaciously ineluctable ululation
...which is insufficiently etiolated. Know what I mean? No, of course you don't, I just wanted to use some of CM's favourite words. He is a bit of a show off with his vocabulary, but this is rendered less impressive by its frequent repetition. Undoubtedly this author has a ferocious imagination, and he is very skilled indeed in painting brilliantly evocative linguistic portraits of the dark cityscape, the characters and events in his epic tale. On the downside, however, this mammoth tome runs to 31 hours of rather ponderous listening, and you end up fervently wishing that he had some rudimentary editing ability. Never use one sentence where 20 will do seems to be his maxim, and you get the sense that the author is having a much better time than the listener/reader. Self-indulgence stuff, a rich and very indigestible meal of a book – if someone is going from point A to point B, you will get every single detail of their journey, everything they saw, everything they thought, everything they ate. If CM was a movie director, a two-hour film would be eight hours long. Things seem to get going about 15 hours in, but then it meanders off again into whimsical musings. There are some splendid sequences, but far too much plodding detail in between. This is the second (and last) of China Mieville's books that I have tried, and failed, to enjoy.
23 people found this helpful
-
Overall
- Nellig
- 14-10-11
Over-egged and under-edited; strangely addictive
Well this thing will definitely give you a run for your money. The writing is often horribly clumsy, but sometimes hits a lovely precise perfection.
As with Embassy Town, the best bit is the set-up. Here we learn about the huge roiling vibrant messy city of New Crobuzon, and the engaging protagonists of the story. I could have done with even more of this stuff.
Then the action starts, and while the author's amazing creativity goes into overdrive, the character development is sacrificed to the needs of the plot, and the protagonists do all sorts of things that don't really make internal sense. The prose gets larded and encrusted with excess verbiage, and the whole thing generally turns to custard (still quite tasty). I just wish he'd had an old-school editor (Diana Athill would have been ideal) to stop him using the word "pugnacious" more than three times a page, making detours totally irrelevant to the plot, and things of that nature.
The text makes huge demands on the narrator, and Jonathan Oliver does an inspired job.
In short, it's a baggy old mess, but still vastly entertaining.
11 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Veronika Murzynova
- 23-10-15
Great book, struggled with narrator
I loved the book itself - read it in my mother tongue previously and was keen to see how it "sounds" in English.
The story is very captivating. I was struggling to finish it though due to the narrator - his voice is too sharp, not sure how to describe it. I'm very sensitive to people shouting and sometimes I had to take this book down to half the volume I normally listen to stuff on, due to the sharpness of his voice.
Second book in the series is much better in this respect!
4 people found this helpful
-
Overall
- mark
- 07-01-12
Loved it
The City of New Corbuzon is a remarkable creation and the author manages to pack a lot of it into the novel. His journey takes the reader from the cultures highs (of which there are not too many) to its lows with a wealth of well imagined characters and locations.
The story itself starts a little slowly but I felt the author used this time well to develop his world. Once going it is a good story with plenty of alien monsters to keep a run of the mill sci fi geek like me wanting to know how it ends. But for those that want more form a novel there is plenty of stuff going on behind the story to keep you thinking.
Initially, I just couldn’t get used to the narrator, I found him overly dramatic and slightly annoying but after a short while it just worked and he was an excellent choice for the book. His characterisation was excellent and he managed to develop individuality while maintaining their alien persona.
At times I did feel the book strayed a little so the author could introduce yet another alien or location which weren’t really necessary. The book could easily have been several hours shorter without losing too much of the plot.
9 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Mark
- 21-06-18
Great for fans of the word "Pugnacious".....
.....because you be hearing it every hour, on the hour, and it will drive you nuts.
This replaces Kate Mosse's Labyrinth as the worst book that I have ever finished. I am not sure why I kept going till the bitter end. It did start out quite well. He creates striking visual imagery, but then he keeps going, and going and going.
Desperately in need of editing, it reads like a 6th former has found the thesaurus button on Word, but let it auto correct, so you have the same arcane word used again and again instead of simpler more direct language. Pugnacious was a particular bug-bear of mine, but other include "stolid", "vertiginous" and "ululate".
It seems to me that he started the story wanting it to be a character study of the weird animal, Cronenberg like, creatures that he had created, but about half way he lost confidence in that and turned it in to James Cameron's Aliens. Shame the former would have been much better.
A note on Jonathan Oliver's narration. He seems to be doing a John Hurt impression, but with the most irritating pauses that stretch every paragraph out to interminable lengths. This is how it ended up at 31 hours. Even fans of this book must think that this is too long.
I gave up with this version and sought out (yeah, I'm a glutton, why did I bother?) another version (although not on Audible). There is one by John Lee, also unabridged, which is only 24 hours long, so you can save yourself 8 hours of pauses and get it over with faster.
3 people found this helpful
-
Overall
- Aurelio
- 03-01-12
Iain M Banks meets Charles Dickens
Stir together Iain M Banks's ruthless creativity and love of random violence, with Dickens' overheated melodrama and grotesque characters, and you have something like China Mieville's Perdido Street Station.
Like Banks, Mieville loves the sound of his own voice. Although other reviewers liked the interminable descriptions of yet another ghastly, depressing aspect of life in New Crobuzon, I thought the story really suffered. This is a seriously long book, 31 hours' worth, and it doesn't really get started until book 3, 15 hours in. It takes stamina and faith to get that far in the hope that something interesting might happen.
It's not as if you can rely on the characters to carry you along. The main protagonist, Grimnebulin, is a shouty bore while the others are so wrapped up in their own misery or so sketchily drawn that you cry out for one person you could actually like or find interesting.
That said, when they get going the action scenes are gripping, and Mieville's imaginative power is truly impressive, although I did suspect, at times, that I was being preached at rather than told a story.
It's a good story, but it badly needs an editor. And if you are looking for something to lighten your mood in the midst of the winter gloom, look elsewhere.
3 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Mifrosu
- 03-10-11
You'll want this one.
You may have read the odd HP Lovecraft story in which our protagonist gets somewhat overwrought by the unspeakable horror lurking on the threshold before, presumably, succumbing rather messily.
These unspeakable, indescribable horrors are all very well, but what we really want is for some brave soul to step up, grab tendril and have a damnably good gander with the magnifying lens. Adventure does indeed have a name, it's China Miéville.
This is the book that keeps giving: just when you think there can be no further inventiveness another big idea smacks you between the eyes (or ears if you're on the audio book).
A crippled bird man is desperate to fly again. He arrives in the sprawling metropolis of New Crobuzon searching for Isaac der Grimnebulin, a scientist he is convinced will find some means of restoring him to the sky. Isaac, profane genius and life and soul of the party, puts the word out he needs flying things to study. He receives something particularly nasty. It all kicks off, and Isaac resolves to kick back.
It's like a rich, dark flipside to Discworld. It's stuffed to the gills with interesting, meaningful characters, extraordinary monsters, and events that put the big screen to shame. It's mind-bogglingly magnificent.
Jonathan Oliver's reading is grand too and he is a fine fit for the book.
6 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Anonymous User
- 19-05-19
Good until about half way through
I enjoyed the first half of the book, all the characters, the threads of plot, descriptions of the city. But then, something changed. The scope of the plot narrowed. The events became tedious. I found it a chore. I wanted to continue with the book, so I increased the speed to 1.5 times and then faster, finishing the last few chapters at 1.85. I would not recommend this book.
2 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- David
- 13-08-12
Not My Cup Of Tea
This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?
As a fan of Sci Fi and Fantasy fiction I have been interested in reading a China Mieville book for some time, I read the young Adult oriented Unlondon and found it too young for me so thought I'd give this one a go which has been well reviewed. I just found it to have no real dramatic thrust and the characters were quite unclear and unengaging to me, the author spends most of the time describing the detail and minutae of the world which I'm sure appeals to some readers but I wanted more attention on the story and characters and ultimately found it disappointing.
3 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- Jack
- 30-08-16
Perdido Street brilliant
I enjoyed this book and the performance of the narrator. inventive, funny, subversive hugely enjoyable.
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- Anonymous User
- 08-05-20
Wonderfully Weird
A wonderfuly weird narrative which weaves its way through a masterfully wrought world. Only sad to see it end.