China Miéville is a fantastic writer (literally, as well as figuratively) and I loved The City And The City in particular. This book however felt as if it was trying to do too much at once, and the result is a bit confusing. Miéville also clearly does not believe in happy endings; almost all the books I've read include a character (or more than one) coming to a sad ending that could, if the author have wanted, been written much more happily. This book's no exception and the end of some of the characters is fairly depressing. So... torn between four stars, for the amazing writing and imaginative setting, and three stars because it was just not an enjoyable or happy book in many ways.

New Crobuzon is a strange, mixed, alien city with many things left unexplained. A mix of "normal" humans and other races all live here together in the shadow of the ribs of some enormous dead creature that is never fully explained. The acceptable punishment for crimes appears to be to turn offenders over to be "remade", literally have their form changed to punish them. So convicted criminals may have limbs removed (or added), new body parts grafted on, unspeakable disfigurations, and often apparently just for the sadistic fun of those doing it. There's great poverty, massive corruption, and a strange magic system never entirely explained.

The book centers mainly around Isaac, a "scientist" studying chaos magic who is hired by a Garuda outlaw to try and restore the wings that were removed as a punishment for a past crime, and Lin, his non-human girlfriend who cannot speak (like all her insect race) and who is hired to create a statue of one of the most powerful drug lords in New Crobuzon. As Lin and Isaac get more deeply involved in their separate commissions they're initially pulled apart more, but then together again as the separate worlds they've been working in start to cross. Add in a somewhat confusing awakening of sapient robots and vicious mass-murdering slake moths that hypnotize their prey with mesmerizing wing patterns, and the whole plot gets quite complicated and probably longer than really necessary until it reaches a conclusive but deeply depressing end.