City of Saints and Madmen

Description

From Jeff VanderMeer, an author praised by writers such as Laren Beukes, Richard Morgan and Michael Moorcock, City of Saints and Madmen is by turns sensuous and terrifying. This collection of four linked novellas is the perfect introduction to VanderMeer's vividly imagined worlds. City of elegance and squalor. Of religious fervour and wanton lusts. And everywhere, on the walls of courtyards and churches, an incandescent fungus of mysterious and ominous origin. In Ambergris, a would-be suitor discovers that a sunlit street can become a killing ground in the blink of an eye. An artist receives an invitation to a beheading - and finds himself enchanted. And a patient in a mental institution is convinced he's made up a city called Ambergris, imagined its every last detail, and that he's really from a place called Chicago. Ambergris is a cruelly beautiful metropolis - a haven for artists and thieves, for composers and murderers. And once there, anything can happen.

Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and editor. His fiction has been translated into twenty languages and has appeared in the Library of America's American Fantastic Tales and multiple year's best anthologies. He writes non-fiction for the Washington Post, the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, and the Guardian, among others. He grew up in the Fiji Islands and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife. His other novels include Annihilation and the Southern Reach trilogy.

Unsettling, erudite, dark ... Ambergris is one of my favourite haunts in fiction * China Mieville * This is fiction to stand alongside that of Calvino and Borges * Guardian * VanderMeer keeps going deeper, and finding new forms of gold * Locus * Beautifully written, virtually hallucinatory work . . . enormously rewarding * Publishers Weekly *