Zoo City

paperback

Published April 5, 2010 by Angry Robot.

ISBN:
978-0-00-732768-3
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4 stars (42 reviews)

Zinzi has a talent for finding lost things.

To save herself, she’s got to find the hardest thing of all: the truth.

An astonishing second novel from the author of the highly-acclaimed Moxyland.

12 editions

Review of 'Zoo City' on 'LibraryThing'

No rating

Wildly imaginative SF novel set in Johannesburg at a time when people who've committed crimes are mysteriously saddled with an animal, which sets them apart as a class (the animalled have to live in their own ghetto and have trouble scraping together a living outside proper society). Our heroine is a kind of detective because she has a strange talent for finding lost things - and intuiting what things people have lost. It's weird and brilliant and utterly original.

Review of 'Zoo City' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Zoo City amazes me. So many threads - fantasy, popular culture, contemporary varieties of exploitation - all braided into one satisfying story. And a hard-boiled hero who hasn't finished deciding who she is and what she's going to do about it.

Review of 'Zoo City' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

I really, really liked the South African style and the matter of fact way that things were said. But less than half way through, I just found myself bored. There was no real hook that caught my attention and I decided my time would be better spent elsewhere.

Review of 'Zoo City' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Zinzi December carries a sloth on her back. He is a mark of what she has done wrong. In an alternate Johannesburg, the animalled, or “zoos”, live as outcasts, surviving as best they can in inner city slums. With Zinzi's animal she got a gift, the ability to find lost things. She doesn't find lost people until one day she breaks her own rule and gets drawn into the shady underbelly of the local music scene.

Zoo City is a hard one to categorise, it's fantasy with a science fiction mindset and a noir plot. Fantasy never really tries to explain the whys behind supernatural creatures and at least here, in Zinzi's world, there have been attempts from scientists to work out what's going on. Some of this is explained through faux extracts, articles and even a section that looks suspiciously like an Amazon product page complete with a range …

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