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Del Rey
July 2010
On Sale: June 29, 2010
509 pages ISBN: 034549749X EAN: 9780345497499 Hardcover
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Science Fiction
With this outrageous new novel, China Miéville has written
one of the strangest, funniest, and flat-out scariest
books you will read this—or any other—year. The London
that comes to life in Kraken is a weird metropolis awash
in secret currents of myth and magic, where criminals,
police, cultists, and wizards are locked in a war to bring
about—or prevent—the End of All Things. In the Darwin Centre at London’s Natural History Museum,
Billy Harrow, a cephalopod specialist, is conducting a
tour whose climax is meant to be the Centre’s prize
specimen of a rare Architeuthis dux—better known as the
Giant Squid. But Billy’s tour takes an unexpected turn
when the squid suddenly and impossibly vanishes into thin
air. As Billy soon discovers, this is the precipitating act in
a struggle to the death between mysterious but powerful
forces in a London whose existence he has been blissfully
ignorant of until now, a city whose denizens—human and
otherwise—are adept in magic and murder. There is the Congregation of God Kraken, a sect of squid
worshippers whose roots go back to the dawn of humanity—
and beyond. There is the criminal mastermind known as the
Tattoo, a merciless maniac inked onto the flesh of a
hapless victim. There is the FSRC—the Fundamentalist and
Sect-Related Crime Unit—a branch of London’s finest that
fights sorcery with sorcery. There is Wati, a spirit from ancient Egypt
who leads a ragtag union of magical familiars. There are
the Londonmancers, who read the future in the city’s
entrails. There is Grisamentum, London’s greatest wizard,
whose shadow lingers long after his death. And then there
is Goss and Subby, an ageless old man and a cretinous boy
who, together, constitute a terrifying—yet darkly
charismatic—demonic duo. All of them—and others—are in pursuit of Billy, who
inadvertently holds the key to the missing squid, an
embryonic god whose powers, properly harnessed, can
destroy all that is, was, and ever shall be.
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