Rating: 5/5 Winged Miracles
Give me the short version: Suffering has come to the vast, bustling, stinking metropolis of New Crobuzon, to walk its streets of teeming foreign altered flesh, science, and alchemy.
That. Was. Magnificent. Fantasy really comes into its own when it's thick, bloody and meaty, unapologetically more of everything. And there's something gleeful about biting into such a page count, in finding the density thick and chewy all the way through. New Crobuzon is a city to haunt your dreams, much as Ambergris (City of Saints and Madmen, Jeff VanderMeer); as beautiful and rancid as the human psyche. Dense with characters whose alienness in no way detracts from their pathos. With so much going on the pacing is exactly right, you race along without stumbling or getting tripped up. And by the end ... glutted, satiated, you find that you somehow still want more.
My favourite bit:
"Isaac watched the huge iridescent scarab that was his lover's head devour her breakfast. He watched her swallow, saw her throat bob where the pale insectile underbelly segued smoothly into her human neck .."