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.

World Fantasy award-winner Ian MacLeod creates an England that is recognisable yet entirely different in this novel of an Industrial Revolution fuelled by magic. He tells the story of an age through the eyes of one man and those he comes into contact with, and of things and people strange and wonderful.

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

In the far future, the Heliothane Dominion is triumphant in the solar system, after a bitter war with their Umbrathane progenitors. But some of the enemy have escaped into the past, intent on wreaking havoc across time. The worst of these is Cowl, an artificially forced advance in human evolution but one who is no longer human.