This Census-Taker: a novella - Hardcover

Miéville, China

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1509812148 ISBN 13: 9781509812141

Publisher: Picador, 2016

Synopsis

In a remote house on a hilltop, a lonely boy witnesses a traumatic event. He tries - and fails - to flee. Left alone with his increasingly deranged parent, he dreams of safety, of joining the other children in the town below, of escape.

When at last a stranger knocks at his door, the boy senses that his days of isolation might be over.

But by what authority does this man keep the meticulous records he carries? What is the purpose behind his questions? Is he friend? Enemy? Or something else altogether?

A novella filled with beauty, terror and strangeness, This Census-Taker by China Miéville is a poignant and riveting exploration of memory and identity.

About this title

Review

A short, dark fairytale, Kafka rewritten by David Mitchell, and may well be the best thing you'll read all year. (Alex Preston, 'Fiction highlights for 2016' Guardian)

Miéville's solid, world-creating imagination is shown to powerful effect in this novella . . . a vague and misty (and, incidentally, superb) tale about the need to get things absolutely straight. (Sunday Times)

Harrowing beauty and existential disorientation . . . it's a Miéville book, after all. As I write this I can very clearly picture two scenes from this story about a boy who witnesses a killing in his isolated rural home. Not a word is said aloud in either scene, but the interpretative stakes in both are high enough to give you a nosebleed. (Helen Oyeyemi The Week)

Miéville's brain-twisting, inventive use of language pins the indefinable to the page, reading this slim book feels like gasping a lungful of air, holding it throughout the letting it out slowly, wondering what just happened. A challenging, thought-provoking read. (Metro)

Miéville creates a beautiful landscape in an uncertain country and era . . . Wonderfully rendered . . . What we're allowed to see and to know takes on an incredible power. This Census-Taker takes root quickly, and you won't soon forget it. (SciFi Now)

A stark and subtle fable that manages to be both lapidary and nebulous at the same time. "Haunting" does not do justice to its exquisitely eerie properties . . . This is the most poetic of Miéville's books so far . . . It can be appreciated just for its complex psychology and emotional impact - it is by far his most plangent book, suffused with a tight-lipped melancholy. (Stuart Kelly Scotland on Sunday)

Gripping and tantalisingly elusive . . . akin to trying to remember an important yet only half-understood event. (SFX)

Miéville is regarded as one of the most interesting and freakishly gifted writers of his generation. He has an astonishing facility - rare in writers of imaginative fiction - for invention . . . The prose is as precise ad the writing done by a monumental mason, but it has been chiselled into a realistic depiction of fog. It is eerie but solid. (Daily Telegraph)

Powerful . . . [China Miéville's] imagination is powerful, his outlook original and he's an amazing teller of stories; yet he never loses his grip on the "reality" of his characters, and he observes the literary rules of his so-called genre only by breaking them. (Kate Saunders The Times)

China Miéville has a gift for turning the strange into the given, and this elusive little world is conveyed with precision and vividness. The result is an ingenious novella that lingers in the mind like an unsettling dream. (Financial Times)

Book Description

A stunning, uncanny and profoundly moving novella from multiple award-winning author China Miéville.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1509812148
• ISBN 13: 9781509812141
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160