A phantasmagoric masterpiece, a book that critics called the best work in the steampunk genre since Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Machine, and colleagues called the most delightful and fascinating novel of our days. In the gigantic metropolis of New Crobuzon, as if emerging from -under the pen of Kafka and Dickens with the mediation of Bosch and Neal Stevenson, side by side there are people and beetle-headed khepris, mermaids and mermen, man-made mutants-repurposed and cactus people. Everyone is busy with their own business: the khepri sculpt statues from colored saliva, drug dealers sell sleeping dope, the police persecute dissidents. And a wingless garuda - a bird-man from distant deserts - appears to the scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin and asks him to teach him to fly again. Meanwhile, Isaac's beetle-headed lover, Lin, receives an equally difficult task: to sculpt a portrait of a powerful mafia leader. Isaac and Lin do not yet know what danger these orders pose - for themselves, the entire city and even the structure of the universe...