In the shadow lee of geography 
 Note Mieville's title: "this" not "the". A slight change of the particle that makes the subject both more particular and more peculiar, knocking it out of kilter. And so it is with the writing. Mieville paints a world built of familiar elements yet where nothing is quite right. There is some history here that we do not know: a legacy some collapsed civilization, of Luddite destruction, warfare and lingering suspicion, laws mysteriously enforced from some distant seat of government. This is a world where even that most precise of bureaucratic functions, the taking of a census, can seem as inscrutable as witchcraft. 
 The only other Mieville book I have read, 
 The City & the City 
 , imagined a divided capital where the two populations, the two ideologies, are not separated by a wall as in Cold War Berlin, but share the same streets unseen to one another, on opposite sides of a Mobius strip. But that was a complex urban construct; this one is simpler. I found myself thinking of some broken-down mining town in West Virginia, although Mieville includes tropical references too. Anyway, a town nestled between two mountains, built around the bridge crossing the chasm between them. It has some amenities--market stalls, street lights that occasionally work--but also derelict buildings, industrial detritus, and a tangle of disused railway lines. The people on the mountains are "uphillers," living apart from one another on rocky holdings, visited by the townsfolk only to trade. 
 The short novel begins with a boy of nine (the narrator, here referring to himself in the third person) running down a mountainside to tell the people below that he has seen his mother murdering his father. We never know his name, though we do find out more of his story, when three temporary constables come up to investigate. His father in fact is alive, but his mother has gone. She has left a note, but the boy is not convinced it is her writing. Besides, he has seen his father killing animals apparently at random and throwing their bodies into a cleft in the rock; might he not have murdered his mother too? But the views we have of him directly are kind and loving, though remote. He is apparently a foreigner, a figure of suspicion and awe. People come to him to have keys made; he asks what they are for, draws them out, cuts them from scrap metal, polishes, and delivers them. These are keys for no physical lock, but talismans, unlocking prosperity, good fortune, desire. 
 Mieville uses words like a wizard, summoning visions of mystery through the smoke of despair. He jumps around between past and present, just as the boy jumps from "he" to "I", thinking in one language and writing in another, not one book but three. The book in our hands is his second, juggling half-forgotten personal histories, whether his own or inherited. His third book, which we never see, contains his secrets. His first is numbers. We don't see that either, but we know its purpose: "to encompass and itemize for a goal, to make it yours. With such intent, everything will be more concrete, the boundaries of the counted city circumscribed more precisely, or you may be more or less lost, or as lost as before." The reader may be lost too; Mieville ends as he began, in mystery. But look through the book again, and you will see how each part enfolds every other, an organic inflorescence, deepening rather than explaining. You may not know much more when you finish, but if you let it, your imagination will have taken you to strange new realms. As the boy's does, imagining the passage of his departed mother: 
 If she took the revenant route it might be she had no choice, that she had to pass through those familiar failing suburbs to scatter cats and go without a shadow past their hides in the roots of walls and carts sat so long wheel-less on their axles that they were less than landscape. To think of her made me afraid again, even in my abrupt nocturnal exultation, so the face I gave her was the sexless wooden one from the rubbish. With that she took the tight alleys in the shadow lee of geography.I gave this five stars on Amazon. Now with the passage of time and the different standards on Goodreads, I can't honestly say "It was amazing," but four stars, "I really liked it," yes.