China Mieville's prose amazes the reader with its intelligence and rich imagination. The fantastic in his stories does not avoid reality, but, on the contrary, reveals it in the most provocative ways. This is what distinguishes the twenty-eight stories from the writer’s new collection. Ambiguous, sometimes satirical, sometimes incredibly touching, original in form and language, they all show people faced with the inexplicable strangeness of the world - or no less inexplicable strangeness in themselves.