Embassytown

Dust jacket by Vincent Chong

Welcome to Arieka, the distant, densely imagined planet that serves as principal setting for China Miéville’s extraordinary new novel, Embassytown.

Immerser Avice Benner Cho has returned to her childhood home, from her adventures in the Out. Her world is as mysterious, complex, and exotic as any you will ever encounter. It is a world in which humans and “exots” co-exist with the indigenous, enigmatic Ariekei—otherwise known as Hosts. That relationship, which is mediated by a group of unique linguists, the Ambassadors, has proceeded in relative tranquility for many years. Then one day a new, utterly unexpected Ambassador arrives…

Embassytown is a novel about diplomacy and conflict in a vividly created alien society. It is also, most centrally, a meditation on the power and infinitely varied possibilities of language itself. The result is an intellectual adventure of the highest order, a distinguished addition to an imposing—and constantly surprising—body of work.

Limited: 500 numbered hardcovers, fully bound in cloth, signed by author
Lettered: 26 copies, bound in leather, signed by author, housed in a custom traycase

From Publishers Weekly (Starred Review):
“Miéville’s brilliant storytelling shines most when Avice works through problems and solutions that develop from the Hosts’ unique and convoluted linguistic evolution, and many of the most intriguing characters are the Hosts themselves. The result is a world masterfully wrecked and rebuilt.”

From Locus:
“Embassytown may not be the colorful space opera that many were anticipating—it’s a novel that demands and earns reflection—but it might well be one that offers, in [Joseph] Conrad’s terms, ‘‘that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.’’

From Ursula K. Le Guin:
“Embassytown is a fully achieved work of art.”

From Entertainment Weekly:
“Miéville's slow-burn narrative is by turns amusing and horrifying, mixing Philip K. Dick-esque satirical banality with a mesmerizing vision of a society on the brink of apocalypse.”

From London Review of Books:
“Miéville’s novels don’t ask us to understand monsters, but they require us to accept the claims even of the monsters we can’t understand, whose stories we’ll never know.”

From The New York Times Book Review:
“Miéville is up to something else. In the case of Embassytown, which with his usual confident ambition takes its monsters and spaceships deep into the zone of overlap between linguistics and politics, let’s call it a: planetary romance/novel of ideas.”

From Jeff VanderMeer, at Barnes and Noble Book Review:
“…original, sophisticated, bristling with subversive ideas, and filled with unforgettably alien images.”