About the Book
Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel 2011.
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.
