A phantasmagorical 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 time.In the giant metropolis of New - Crobuzon, as if coming out from the pen of Kafka and Dickens through the mediation of Bosch and Neil Stevenson, side by side there are people and beetle-headed khepri, mermaids and water, man-made mutants-remade and people-cacti. Everyone is busy with their own business: khepri sculpt statues from colored saliva, drug dealers sell sleepy dope, police pursue dissidents. And a wingless garuda, a bird-man from distant deserts, comes to the scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin and asks him to teach him to fly again. Meanwhile, Isaac's beetle-headed lover, Lin, is given an equally difficult task: to carve a portrait of a powerful mafia boss. Isaac and Lin do not yet know what danger these orders are fraught with - for themselves, the entire city and even the structure of the universe ...