Book cover for The Last Days of New Paris

The Last Days of New Paris

Synopsis

Details

23 February 2017
224 pages
9781447296560
Imprint: Picador

Reviews

A dazzling scholarly fantasy . . . The bestiary of surrealist manifs, or manifestations, that Miéville parades before us is dazzling . . . the effect is exhilaratingly precise and serious, as though Albert Camus had rewritten Raiders of the Lost Ark . . . At the story’s climax it turns out to be satisfyingly horrible, but not as bad as what follows – a brilliantly eerie apparition that it would be invidious to reveal here . . . This intense, scholarly fantasy speaks to our age.
Treading the line between beauty and horror, history and fantasy, Miéville filters a clash of art and philistinism through the medium of wartime spy fiction. This dense, clever book’s flights of fancy are grounded in details such as “a miraculously uneaten cat” dashing for cover, the whole thing rounded off with a knowing satirical wink.
[The Last Days of New Paris] has a hallucinatory jeu d’esprit . . . Fun, very inventive and thoughtful, particularly for readers interested in Surrealism’s revolutionary politics. I loved it.
If anyone were to write a sequel to Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino’s dreamlike catalogue of fantastic places, then China Miéville might well be the man for the job . . . Miéville has always had a knack for visions of the uncanny . . . Here he is evoking other people’s imaginings, still with precision and grace.