The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at centre of its own bewildering world. A stranger has come, with an impossible demand, and something unthinkable is released. Soon the city is gripped by an alien terror. The urban nightscape becomes a hunting ground and a reckoning is due at the city's heart, in the vast edifice of Perdido Street Station.

This is the story of a prisoner's journey. The search for the island of a forgotten people, for the most astonishing beast in the seas, and ultimately for a fabled place - a massive wound in reality, a source of unthinkable power and danger.

New Crobuzon is being ripped apart from without and within. War with the shadowy city-state of Tesh and rioting on the streets at home are pushing the teeming metropolis to the brink. In the midst of this turmoil, a mysterious masked figure spurs strange rebellion, while treachery and violence incubate in unexpected places.

Owen Deathstalker, outlawed by the Iron Bitch, the Empress Lionstone, is fomenting rebellion - and now it's all-out war: Deathstalker War

'Light puts most modern fiction to shame. It's a magnificent book' China Mieville

Fleeing the ghosts of their violent past, two former revolutionaries - the roguish, rakish Gwynn and the taciturn Raule - escape from the ruined and deserted Copper Country to the tropical city of Ashamoil. As they salvage new lives from the rubble of the old, they discover that the ghosts of the past are also the ghosts of the future.