The City & The City - pg. 41

Read the travelogues of the last-but-one century and those older, and the strange and beautiful right-to-left Illitan calligraphy -- and its jarring phonetics -- is constantly remarked on. At some point everyone has heard Sterne, from his travelogue: "In the Land of Alphabets Arabic caught Dame Sanskrit's eye (drunk he was despite Muhamed's injunctions, else her age would have dissuaded). Nine months later a disowned child was put out. The feral babe is Illitan, Hermes-Aphrodite not without beauty. He has something of both his parents in his form, but the voice of those who raised him -- the birds."

The City & The City - pg. 25

In the morning trains ran on a raised line metres from my window. They were not in my city. I did not of course, but I could have stared into the carriages -- they were quite that close -- and caught the eyes of foreign travellers.

The City & The City - Opening

Chapter One

I COULD NOT SEE THE STREET or much of the estate. We were enclosed by dirt-coloured blocks, from windows out of which leaned vested men and women with morning hair and mugs of drink, eating breakfast and watching us. This open ground between the buildings had once been sculpted. It pitched like a golf course -- a child's mimicking of geography. Maybe they had been going to wood it and put in a pond. There was a copse but the saplings were dead.

The City & The City is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

2010 Del Rey Trade Paperback Edition

Copyright 2009 by China Mieville.

Excerpt from Kraken copyright 2010 by China Mieville

Random House reading group guide copyright 2010 Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Perdido Street Station - pg. 56

It was not a purer realm that loomed vastly over the city. Smokestacks punctured the membrane between the land and the air and disgorged tons of poisonous smog into the upper world rooftops, the detritus from a million low chimneys eddied together. Crematoria vented into the airborne ashes of wills burnt by jealous executors, which mixed with coaldust burnt to keep dying lovers warm. Thousands of sordid smoke-ghosts wrapped New Crobuzon in a stench that suffocated like guilt.

Perdido Street Station - pg. 55

The city thrust upwards massively, as if inspired by those vast mountains that rose to the west. Blistering square slabs of habitation ten, twenty, thirty storeys high punctuated the skyline. They burst into the air like fat fingers, like fists, like the stumps of limbs waving frantically above the swells of the lower houses. The tons of concrete and tar that constituted the city covered ancient geography, knolls and barrows and verges, undulations that were still visible. Slum houses spilt down the sides of Vaudois Hill, Flyside, Flag Hill, St. Jabber's Mound like scree.

Perdido Street Station - pg. 40

And Yagharek told Isaac, to Isaac's growing amazement, of the Cymek library. The great librarian clan who strapped the thousands of volumes into their trunks and carried between them as they flew, following the food and the water in the perpetual, punishing Cymek summer. The enormous tent village that sprung up where they landed, and the garuda bands that congregated on the vast, sprawling centre of learning whenever it was in their reach.

Perdido Street Station - pg. 28

Lin to her mortal horror was running late.

It did not help that she was not an afficionado of Bonetown. The cross-bred architecture of that outlandish quarter confused her: a syncresis of industrialism and the gaudy domestic ostentation of the slightly rich, the peeling concrete of forgotten docklands and the stretched skins of shantytown tents. The different forms segued into each other seemingly at random in this low, flat zone, full of urban scrubland and wasteground where wildflowers and thick-stemmed plants pushed through plains of concrete and tar.

Perdido Street Station - Opening

A window burst open high above the market. A basket flew from it and arced towards the oblivious crowd. It spasmed in mid-air, then spun and continued earthwards at a slower, uneven pace. Dancing precariously as it descended, its wire-mesh caught and skittered on the building's rough hide. It scrabbled at the wall, sending paint and concrete dust plummeting before it.

"I even gave up for a while, stopping by the window of the room to look out at the lights and deep, illuminated streets. That's a form of dying, that losing contact with the city like that."

Philip K. Dick, We Can Build You

to Emma

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A Del Rey Book

Published by The Random House Publishing Group

Copyright 2000 by China Miéville

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Great Britain by Macmillan Publishers Ltd., London, in 2000.

Perdido Street Station is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are a product of the autor's imagination or are used fictitiously.

Manufactured in the United States of America