Embassytown

​Winner of the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, China Mieville's astonishing Embassytown is an intelligent and immersive exploration of language in an alien world.

Embassytown: a city of contradictions on the outskirts of the universe.

Avice is an immerser, a traveller on the immer, the sea of space and time below the everyday, now returned to her birth planet. Here on Arieka, humans are not the only intelligent life, and Avice has a rare bond with the natives, the enigmatic Hosts - who cannot lie. Only a tiny cadre of unique human Ambassadors can speak Language, and connect the two communities. But an unimaginable new arrival has come to Embassytown. And when this Ambassador speaks, everything changes. Catastrophe looms. Avice knows the only hope is for her to speak directly to the alien Hosts. And that is impossible.

Avice Benner Cho, a human colonist on a distant planet populated by the Ariekei, sentient beings famed for their unique language, returns to Embassytown after many years of deep space exploration to find she has become a living simile in the Ariekei language even though she cannot speak it,and she is torn by competing loyalties when hostilities erupt between humans and aliens.

REVIEW

"Miéville has constructed a breathtaking world of understanding a new system of measuring time and neologisms that crackle in nearly every paragraph, adding style to the plot" - Sunday Telegraph.

"This is a serious, thought-provoking, idea-driven novel. It's also playful, politicatly acute, complex, stylish and the next best fictional take on linguistics since lan Watson's Embedding" - The Times

China Miéville, three-time winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, twice winner of the British Fantasy award, winner of the Hugo, World Fantasy and BSFA awards 2010.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

​China Miéville lives and works in London. He is three-time winner of the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award (Perdido Street Station, Iron Council and The City & The City) and has also won the British Fantasy Award twice (Perdido Street Station and The Scar). The City & The City, an existential thriller, was published in 2009 to dazzling critical acclaim and drew comparison with the works of Kafka and Orwell (The Times) and Philip K. Dick (Guardian).​

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PRODUCT DETAILS​​​

• Publisher ‏ : ‎Pan Books (5 Jan. 2012)
• Language ‏ : ‎English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎405 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎033053307X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎978-0330533072
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎13 x 2.5 x 19.7 cm