The Station of Lost Dreams

In the gigantic metropolis of New Croydon—apparently lifted straight from the pens of Kafka and Dickens, with Bosch and Neal Stephenson acting as intermediaries—people and beetle-headed hephri, mermaids and water spirits, handmade mutants-reworked and cactus-people live side by side. Everyone is busy with their own business: the hephri sculpt statues out of colored slime, drug dealers sell sleepy dope, and the police hunt down dissidents. And then the scientist Isaac Dan der Grimbebulin is visited by a wingless garuda—a man-bird from far desert lands—and asks him to teach him how to fly again. Meanwhile, Isaac’s beetle-headed lover, Lin, receives an even more complicated assignment: to sculpt a portrait of a powerful mafia boss. Isaac and Lin still don’t know what kind of danger those orders entail—for themselves, for the entire city, and even for the very structure of reality…