From the bestselling and award-winning master of speculative fiction comes a deeply moving, decade- and continent-spanning epic: forced to investigate a devastating personal tragedy, an ordinary woman stumbles on dark conspiracies, and provokes the attention of uncanny forces.

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China Miéville is a New York Times bestselling author of fiction and nonfiction. His novels include The City & The City, Embassytown, and Perdido Street Station. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction, he has won the World Fantasy, Hugo, and Arthur C. Clarke awards, among others. His nonfiction includes a study of international law and a history of the Russian Revolution.

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the award-winning master of uncanny fiction comes a defining work, twenty years in the making—a deeply moving, decade- and continent-spanning epic of personal grief, global tumult, and grim conspiracy.

“An intimate epic, a controlled sprawl of history and emotional resonance. I felt it in my bones, the undeniable power of a jagged masterpiece.”—Jeff VanderMeer, The New York Times Book Review

Maur’s life has been shaped by loss: an apparently ordinary tragedy. But in its aftermath arise deeper, stranger questions. Their answers may lie within the dark heart and darker history of an old soldier who shares Maur’s obsessions and who is violently pursued by the same unknown, unquiet forces.

So begins a book unlike any other: at once an encyclopaedic and multitudinous saga of a bloody century and the intimate story of two lives, their loves, regrets, and secrets—and a terrifying journey into infinite mystery.

Leseprobe
[i]

The light is bright enough, white enough, to make you think of dying. Close your eyes, you still see it.

Stay out of the dead’s business, your father said. Beyond the glass a leafless tree strains into the daylight. Stay out of the dead’s business, they don’t care what you do.

Someone wrote to you, I’m so sorry he’s passed, and, furious as if because you were supposed to be, you said, Passed? What does he pass for? Did he pass a test? Did he do well?

These days there are so many odd and troubling noises in the city. Things go missing. You could upend your bag and tally what’s gone. A lighter with a picture on it of the sea. Notes to yourself. That clasp for your hair your sister’s child once called a bear trap and mimicked with crooked fingers. Your son had no such name for it.

In the dank first evening of this year, far from here, alone by the coast, you brought your car to a halt where the road widened between fields. In the dimming world your headlamps caught a sign: passing place. That letter came back to you. He’s passed: not he has but he is passed. Object at last. Everyone passes him.

Only you were on that road. The sign was permission for something you would not and will not yet articulate.

Bring forth figures of memory. He, your boy, more exact than any other. Among the shades beyond the halo shine amid thorns unseen waiting for you. For anyone, to pass them by. To pass.

Now open your eyes again. Now in this room don’t weep, as you wept in the passing place. Look up. Stare up again at the striplight glare, as you must not at the sun.

[ii]

Maur returned to her father’s house.

Late spring ’73. She cadged a lift from a friend’s friend going to London. The month had opened grim, and when they wound down the windows the boxy Vauxhall filled with wind and noise and they laughed. The horizon receded. At a sign for Greenfield Town, Maur said, Oh god actually let’s not, can you just take me with you?

Fitful rain, concrete offices in a sprawl foul-smelling with chemicals. The driver glanced at her watch and asked Maur if she wanted to be taken to her door.

Maur said it was fine.

Sure? Here okay?

A roundabout on the crowded ring road. Maur stood with a suitcase in each hand where light waned grey beyond an industrial estate. When the car was out of sight she let her shoulders come down. She regretted her shoes.

Two young men leaned on the fencing of the railway bridge and eyed her with sullen interest. One said, That’s too much for you to carry darling let me give you a hand. She did not speed up and they did not follow her. She heard one of them spit onto the tracks before an incoming train.

It was as if the main street had been replaced with a set painted not quite right. Pedestrians all had their backs to her. From the façade of what had been an umbrella store—No, seriously! she would say when she described it—jutted an empty frame. Her clothes were too bright for all this. Days-old Daily Mirror headlines frayed in displays. Army says sorry, Anything goes. For the duration of a cigarette she stood illuminated by signs, unsure if this was stalling.

In a bin-filled alley where once she’d played hiding games, her finger to her own lips to shush herself, she opened her father’s door.

She would be anew. This is where a remembrance begins. Maur you will remember.

•

Hello?

Movement within.

Hi, she said.

Her father descended. Stopped with steps still to go so her eyes were level with his midriff.

You’re in Lancaster, he said.

Am I? She examined her arms and legs. Wow.

Ah, ha.

He looked away, then sharply back at her. Everything’s fine, she said, so he nodded.

Good, he said. He clasped his arms and did a smile. Well, welcome home, this is unexpected.

Her school friends always said he was good-looking and even middle age’s slide became him. He finished coming down and leaned to kiss her cheek. She smelt Burley and dust. She hung up her coat, hitched her jeans and pushed her shoes off with her toes and turned to face him, and her father was quicker than she had thought he would be. She barely showed but he was staring without expression at her belly.

•

Maur Towns retraced old routes again, this time with her shoulders back. Many people her father’s age and older. She kept her eyes on some imagined vanishing point. For once she did not linger at the old books in Goodson’s window. At the door to Hill’s Café a young man with the beat-up face of a fighter brazenly stared. Outside the ironmonger’s, school-uniformed girls made sure to laugh at her shaggy afghan and eyeliner sweep but they were fascinated, and remembering herself five years younger, Maur felt nearly weepy.

Ducks went dignified past loosestrife and bobbing trash and the remnant of a rowboat’s prow that for her whole life had twitched in the water tethered to something sunken. It was the tip of a root, she had told her mother, of an inverted tree that grew downward through black water to a secret place. It was as if some other girl had imagined that. In the little park her mother had sat on the playground benches where Maur sat now. It was cold and no children came to the swings or the seesaw or the witch’s hat.

Maur’s remembered self was pigtailed, a girl from an ice cream sign, dancing in a circle. Bygone companions, snowball fights, snogs, cider bought for them by a friendly derelict, exam results, two brief horrid physical fights. In her mind she full-named each child who’d been there but herself: Sally Morgan Katherine Cregg Tommy Bishop John Ian Tremaine, Maur.

From the bath she watched the light-pull sway with the weight of a holed stone her mother had taken from a beach. Here came again an intimation that since her mother died Maur had made no choices. That everything had been decided, not by her nor her father, nor any overwatching maternal trace, but by some opaque authority. U…