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Perdido Street Station: New Crobuzon, Book 1
- Narrated by: Jonathan Oliver
- Series: New Crobuzon, Book 1
- Length: 31 hrs
- Unabridged Audiobook
- Categories: Science Fiction & Fantasy, Fantasy
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The Scar
- New Crobuzon, Book 2
- By: China Mieville
- Narrated by: Damian Lynch
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A pirate city hauled across the oceans.... A hidden miracle about be revealed.... These are the ingredients of an astonishing story. It is the story of a prisoner's journey. Of 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.
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First Rate
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Iron Council
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It is a time of revolts and revolutions, conflict and intrigue. 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. In desperation, a small group of renegades escapes from the city and crosses strange and alien continents in the search for a lost hope, an undying legend.
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A pirate city hauled across the oceans.... A hidden miracle about be revealed.... These are the ingredients of an astonishing story. It is the story of a prisoner's journey. Of 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.
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First Rate
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Great story
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The Complete Earthsea Series & The Left Hand of Darkness
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Publisher's Summary
Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies, junkies, and whores. In New Crobuzon, the unsavory deal is stranger to none—not even to Isaac, a brilliant scientist with a penchant for Crisis Theory.
Isaac has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research. But when a half-bird, half-human creature known as the Garuda comes to him from afar, Isaac is faced with challenges he has never before fathomed. Though the Garuda's request is scientifically daunting, Isaac is sparked by his own curiosity and an uncanny reverence for this curious stranger.
While Isaac's experiments for the Garuda turn into an obsession, one of his lab specimens demands attention: a brilliantly colored caterpillar that feeds on nothing but a hallucinatory drug and grows larger—and more consuming—by the day. What finally emerges from the silken cocoon will permeate every fiber of New Crobuzon—and not even the Ambassador of Hell will challenge the malignant terror it invokes.
Critic Reviews
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What listeners say about Perdido Street Station: New Crobuzon, Book 1
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Rachael
- 14-03-2020
unusual and captivating
Beautifully narrated, with so many fantastical creative voices for a different, unweildy, strange story. Not much of an ending but a very adventurous ride.
2 people found this helpful
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- ChattaD
- 24-07-2017
Spectacular!!!
The Weaver is by far one of the most interesting and terrifying creatures! Godsdamn this was a fantastic read!
1 person found this helpful
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- Huwge XB
- 28-05-2021
Awful performance
Reader so unpleasant that I actively switched my brain off. Couldn’t last longer than 40 minutes. Unpleasant cadence, rhythm and emHASIS on the wrong syLLabLES mean that You feel like he’s yelling random words at you.
Probably a great story, won’t finish listening.
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- Anonymous User
- 12-03-2021
narration that doesnt hold back
an exciting and brutal story. Miellville is unrelenting. the narrator takes it to a new level, i was a bit taken back at first by the range of vocies for the different races, but quickly was swooped into the world
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- Anna Cherkasova
- 12-10-2020
Excellent book. I am going to read the whole China
Also, the reader is very good too, keeps you entertained all the way through the book
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- Anonymous User
- 14-12-2019
Distilled Fantasy.
Vast, rich, magnificent and enthralling. Jonathon Oliver and China Mieville superb. Is there any art work?
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- Joe
- 02-03-2019
Beautifully Grotesque in all the best ways.
This book was recommended to me when I was searching for good "monster fight" books and I'm glad to say it was a fantastic read. The voice actor was great and China Mieville did an amazing job dragging you into his world of perversion and grime in a way I've never experienced before. absolutely buying the next book and cannot recommend this one enough to those interested in some of the stranger worlds scifi writers can create.
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- Jerry Furnell
- 28-06-2018
So bad... I must be the odd man out...
I have no idea why others thought this was good or that it even deserved a second book. Just terrible and the reader... so bad.
1 person found this helpful
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- David
- 13-08-2012
Not My Cup Of Tea
This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?
As a fan of Sci Fi and Fantasy fiction I have been interested in reading a China Mieville book for some time, I read the young Adult oriented Unlondon and found it too young for me so thought I'd give this one a go which has been well reviewed. I just found it to have no real dramatic thrust and the characters were quite unclear and unengaging to me, the author spends most of the time describing the detail and minutae of the world which I'm sure appeals to some readers but I wanted more attention on the story and characters and ultimately found it disappointing.
3 people found this helpful
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- Jack
- 30-08-2016
Perdido Street brilliant
I enjoyed this book and the performance of the narrator. inventive, funny, subversive hugely enjoyable.
1 person found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 08-05-2020
Wonderfully Weird
A wonderfuly weird narrative which weaves its way through a masterfully wrought world. Only sad to see it end.
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- Will
- 31-01-2012
Flawed. Overlong. Masterful.
This book badly needed a more authoritative editor. The description passages are far too long. The author uses words like "bathetic", "vertiginous" and "solipsistic" where they're not needed. Space spent on excessive detail could have been spent extending the ending, which is perfunctory and unsatisfying and does almost none of the main characters justice.
Why, then, have I given this verbose, poorly-ended book five stars? Because it's a thing of beauty. A truly unique fantasy work, breathtakingly creative and lovingly realised. It contains one of the most distinctive settings you're likely to find, one of the most genuinely affecting relationships I've experienced in speculative fiction, and some of the coolest characters and monsters anywhere. The world of Bas-Lag is brilliantly complete and endlessly surprising; dark and unpleasant yet fascinating. It's somewhere in between science fiction and fantasy (I would describe it as retrofuturist fantasy), and it's changed how I think about both. The plot, up until the last couple of hours, is coherent and engaging, and twists and turns with an unpredictability rarely seen. It's definitely political, but not excessively so. It's marvellous.
Sometimes a bad ending retroactively ruins the whole book, or film, or game, or at least permanently tarnishes your appreciation of it. Not here. When I finished this audiobook yesterday, I was annoyed at the ending, but I'm definitely glad I went along for the ride. Jonathan Oliver's narration fits the tone of the writing brilliantly. In places, it has an excess of drama to match the excess of verbosity, but when the writing is more measured the narration really shines, and his voices are great. I especially like the way he voices the non-human characters, particularly Lin.
I've never written a review for audible this long before, but I wanted to make my complex feelings known. If you like speculative fiction, Perdido Street Station offers something unique. Try it out!
43 people found this helpful
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- J. Lennon
- 18-07-2018
Great book, awful audio
This audiobook takes a wonderful story and delivers it in the manner of an angry Victorian headmaster. The ever present sibilance is like someone spitting in your ears. Sounds like it was recording by a dribbling sociopath locked in a cupboard with a dictaphone. Bad delivery and bad production rendering one of my all time favourite books unlistenable.
17 people found this helpful
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- Veronika Murzynova
- 23-10-2015
Great book, struggled with narrator
I loved the book itself - read it in my mother tongue previously and was keen to see how it "sounds" in English.
The story is very captivating. I was struggling to finish it though due to the narrator - his voice is too sharp, not sure how to describe it. I'm very sensitive to people shouting and sometimes I had to take this book down to half the volume I normally listen to stuff on, due to the sharpness of his voice.
Second book in the series is much better in this respect!
7 people found this helpful
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- Nellig
- 14-10-2011
Over-egged and under-edited; strangely addictive
Well this thing will definitely give you a run for your money. The writing is often horribly clumsy, but sometimes hits a lovely precise perfection.
As with Embassy Town, the best bit is the set-up. Here we learn about the huge roiling vibrant messy city of New Crobuzon, and the engaging protagonists of the story. I could have done with even more of this stuff.
Then the action starts, and while the author's amazing creativity goes into overdrive, the character development is sacrificed to the needs of the plot, and the protagonists do all sorts of things that don't really make internal sense. The prose gets larded and encrusted with excess verbiage, and the whole thing generally turns to custard (still quite tasty). I just wish he'd had an old-school editor (Diana Athill would have been ideal) to stop him using the word "pugnacious" more than three times a page, making detours totally irrelevant to the plot, and things of that nature.
The text makes huge demands on the narrator, and Jonathan Oliver does an inspired job.
In short, it's a baggy old mess, but still vastly entertaining.
13 people found this helpful
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- Martin
- 21-05-2013
Slough of pugnaciously ineluctable ululation
...which is insufficiently etiolated. Know what I mean? No, of course you don't, I just wanted to use some of CM's favourite words. He is a bit of a show off with his vocabulary, but this is rendered less impressive by its frequent repetition. Undoubtedly this author has a ferocious imagination, and he is very skilled indeed in painting brilliantly evocative linguistic portraits of the dark cityscape, the characters and events in his epic tale. On the downside, however, this mammoth tome runs to 31 hours of rather ponderous listening, and you end up fervently wishing that he had some rudimentary editing ability. Never use one sentence where 20 will do seems to be his maxim, and you get the sense that the author is having a much better time than the listener/reader. Self-indulgence stuff, a rich and very indigestible meal of a book – if someone is going from point A to point B, you will get every single detail of their journey, everything they saw, everything they thought, everything they ate. If CM was a movie director, a two-hour film would be eight hours long. Things seem to get going about 15 hours in, but then it meanders off again into whimsical musings. There are some splendid sequences, but far too much plodding detail in between. This is the second (and last) of China Mieville's books that I have tried, and failed, to enjoy.
26 people found this helpful
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Overall

- mark
- 07-01-2012
Loved it
The City of New Corbuzon is a remarkable creation and the author manages to pack a lot of it into the novel. His journey takes the reader from the cultures highs (of which there are not too many) to its lows with a wealth of well imagined characters and locations.
The story itself starts a little slowly but I felt the author used this time well to develop his world. Once going it is a good story with plenty of alien monsters to keep a run of the mill sci fi geek like me wanting to know how it ends. But for those that want more form a novel there is plenty of stuff going on behind the story to keep you thinking.
Initially, I just couldn’t get used to the narrator, I found him overly dramatic and slightly annoying but after a short while it just worked and he was an excellent choice for the book. His characterisation was excellent and he managed to develop individuality while maintaining their alien persona.
At times I did feel the book strayed a little so the author could introduce yet another alien or location which weren’t really necessary. The book could easily have been several hours shorter without losing too much of the plot.
11 people found this helpful
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- Mark
- 21-06-2018
Great for fans of the word "Pugnacious".....
.....because you be hearing it every hour, on the hour, and it will drive you nuts.
This replaces Kate Mosse's Labyrinth as the worst book that I have ever finished. I am not sure why I kept going till the bitter end. It did start out quite well. He creates striking visual imagery, but then he keeps going, and going and going.
Desperately in need of editing, it reads like a 6th former has found the thesaurus button on Word, but let it auto correct, so you have the same arcane word used again and again instead of simpler more direct language. Pugnacious was a particular bug-bear of mine, but other include "stolid", "vertiginous" and "ululate".
It seems to me that he started the story wanting it to be a character study of the weird animal, Cronenberg like, creatures that he had created, but about half way he lost confidence in that and turned it in to James Cameron's Aliens. Shame the former would have been much better.
A note on Jonathan Oliver's narration. He seems to be doing a John Hurt impression, but with the most irritating pauses that stretch every paragraph out to interminable lengths. This is how it ended up at 31 hours. Even fans of this book must think that this is too long.
I gave up with this version and sought out (yeah, I'm a glutton, why did I bother?) another version (although not on Audible). There is one by John Lee, also unabridged, which is only 24 hours long, so you can save yourself 8 hours of pauses and get it over with faster.
4 people found this helpful
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- Aurelio
- 03-01-2012
Iain M Banks meets Charles Dickens
Stir together Iain M Banks's ruthless creativity and love of random violence, with Dickens' overheated melodrama and grotesque characters, and you have something like China Mieville's Perdido Street Station.
Like Banks, Mieville loves the sound of his own voice. Although other reviewers liked the interminable descriptions of yet another ghastly, depressing aspect of life in New Crobuzon, I thought the story really suffered. This is a seriously long book, 31 hours' worth, and it doesn't really get started until book 3, 15 hours in. It takes stamina and faith to get that far in the hope that something interesting might happen.
It's not as if you can rely on the characters to carry you along. The main protagonist, Grimnebulin, is a shouty bore while the others are so wrapped up in their own misery or so sketchily drawn that you cry out for one person you could actually like or find interesting.
That said, when they get going the action scenes are gripping, and Mieville's imaginative power is truly impressive, although I did suspect, at times, that I was being preached at rather than told a story.
It's a good story, but it badly needs an editor. And if you are looking for something to lighten your mood in the midst of the winter gloom, look elsewhere.
4 people found this helpful
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- Mifrosu
- 03-10-2011
You'll want this one.
You may have read the odd HP Lovecraft story in which our protagonist gets somewhat overwrought by the unspeakable horror lurking on the threshold before, presumably, succumbing rather messily.
These unspeakable, indescribable horrors are all very well, but what we really want is for some brave soul to step up, grab tendril and have a damnably good gander with the magnifying lens. Adventure does indeed have a name, it's China Miéville.
This is the book that keeps giving: just when you think there can be no further inventiveness another big idea smacks you between the eyes (or ears if you're on the audio book).
A crippled bird man is desperate to fly again. He arrives in the sprawling metropolis of New Crobuzon searching for Isaac der Grimnebulin, a scientist he is convinced will find some means of restoring him to the sky. Isaac, profane genius and life and soul of the party, puts the word out he needs flying things to study. He receives something particularly nasty. It all kicks off, and Isaac resolves to kick back.
It's like a rich, dark flipside to Discworld. It's stuffed to the gills with interesting, meaningful characters, extraordinary monsters, and events that put the big screen to shame. It's mind-bogglingly magnificent.
Jonathan Oliver's reading is grand too and he is a fine fit for the book.
6 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 19-05-2019
Good until about half way through
I enjoyed the first half of the book, all the characters, the threads of plot, descriptions of the city. But then, something changed. The scope of the plot narrowed. The events became tedious. I found it a chore. I wanted to continue with the book, so I increased the speed to 1.5 times and then faster, finishing the last few chapters at 1.85. I would not recommend this book.
2 people found this helpful
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