This Census-Taker
25 February 2016
Imprint: Macmillan Digital Audio
Synopsis
In a remote house on a hilltop, a lonely boy witnesses a traumatic event. He tries - and fails - to flee. Left alone with his increasingly deranged parent, he dreams of safety, of joining the other children in the town below, of escape.
When at last a stranger knocks at his door, the boy senses that his days of isolation might be over.
But by what authority does this man keep the meticulous records he carries? What is the purpose behind his questions? Is he friend? Enemy? Or something else altogether?
A novella filled with beauty, terror and strangeness, This Census-Taker by China Miéville is a poignant and riveting exploration of memory and identity.
Details
25 February 2016
242 pages
China Miéville, Matthew Frow
9781509828548
Imprint: Macmillan Digital Audio
Reviews
“A short, dark fairytale, Kafka rewritten by David Mitchell, and may well be the best thing you'll read all year.”Alex Preston, 'Fiction highlights for 2016', Guardian
“Harrowing beauty and existential disorientation . . . it's a Miéville book, after all. As I write this I can very clearly picture two scenes from this story about a boy who witnesses a killing in his isolated rural home. Not a word is said aloud in either scene, but the interpretative stakes in both are high enough to give you a nosebleed.”Helen Oyeyemi, The Week
“A stark and subtle fable that manages to be both lapidary and nebulous at the same time. "Haunting" does not do justice to its exquisitely eerie properties . . . This is the most poetic of Miéville's books so far . . . It can be appreciated just for its complex psychology and emotional impact - it is by far his most plangent book, suffused with a tight-lipped melancholy.”Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
“Powerful . . . [China Miéville's] imagination is powerful, his outlook original and he's an amazing teller of stories; yet he never loses his grip on the "reality" of his characters, and he observes the literary rules of his so-called genre only by breaking them.”Kate Saunders, The Times
