The Rouse

Maur has lost someone, and on the surface it is an ordinary tragedy of the kind that happens to many people. But grief has a way of raising questions that won't stay quiet, and these ones turn out to be stranger and heavier than Maur expected. The answers may lie with an elderly former soldier. He shares Maur's fixations, and his past is full of its own shadows. Something unseen and restless is hunting him, and it is violent about it. The same forces that dog him have an interest in Maur too. China Miéville, known for his unsettling, genre-bending fiction, spent twenty years on this novel. It moves across continents and through a century of bloodshed and upheaval, while staying close to two people: their loves, their regrets and the secrets they keep. The result is part sweeping historical saga, part intimate portrait of mourning, and part descent into something frightening that resists explanation.