Booktopia Comments
Lauren Beukes' Zoo City wins the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel for 2010
Product Description
WHERE NO ONE ELSE DARE VENTURE...
Zinzi has a Sloth on her back, a dirty online 419 scam habit - and a talent for finding lost things. But when her latest client, a little old lady, turns up dead and the cops confiscate her lastpaycheck, she's forced to take on her least favourite kind of job: missing persons.
An astonishing second novel from the author of the highly-acclaimed "Moxyland."
Reviews:
"Beukes (Moxyland) delivers a thrill ride that gleefully merges narrative styles and tropes, almost single-handedly pulling the "urban fantasy" subgenre back towards its groundbreaking roots." - "Publisher's Weekly," starred review
"Zoo City" is a fabulous outing from an extremely promising writer... [it] has so much fabulous wordplay, imaginative settings and scenarios, and such a dark and cynical heart that I was totally riveted by it." - Cory Doctorow, "BoingBoing
"In "Zoo City" we have an unfamiliar land full of familiars, a broken Johannesburg of the near future peopled with damaged wonders. Proving her debut novel was no fluke, she writes better than I wish I could on my best day. If our words are bullets, Lauren Beukes is a marksman in a world of drunken machine-gunners, firing her ideas and images into us with a sly and deadly accuracy, wasting nothing, never missing. I'll follow her career as long as she's willing to write and I'm able to read." - Bill Willi
Industry Reviews
A "Publisher's Weekly" Best of 2011 Sci Fi & Fantasy Pick!
"Beukes's energetic noir phantasmagoria, the winner of this year's Arthur C. Clarke Award, crackles with original ideas." --Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times Book Review
"Beukes (Moxyland) delivers a thrill ride that gleefully merges narrative styles and tropes, almost single-handedly pulling the "urban fantasy" subgenre back towards its groundbreaking roots." - "Publisher's Weekly," starred review
""Zoo City" is a fabulous outing from an extremely promising writer... [it] has so much fabulous wordplay, imaginative settings and scenarios, and such a dark and cynical heart that I was totally riveted by it." - Cory Doctorow, "BoingBoing
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"In "Zoo City" we have an unfamiliar land full of familiars, a broken Johannesburg
of the near future peopled with damaged wonders. Proving her debut novel was no fluke, she writes better than I wish I could on my best day. If our words are bullets, Lauren Beukes is a marksman in a world of drunken machine-gunners, firing her ideas and images into us with a sly and deadly accuracy, wasting nothing, never missing. I'll follow her career as long as she's willing to write and I'm able to read." - Bill Willingham, creator of "Fables"
""Zoo City" is a story of mysteries unfolding, and it is a story well told. But it's the world around the story, and the words that guide us through, that make it something more than simply marvellous. With her subtle, intimate descriptions of the roads we walk in this crazy city; with characters so deeply twisty you could lose a giant squid in their nebulous hidey holes, and with turns of phrase that are as likely to conjure up Rudyard Kipling, Brenda Fassie or Credo Mutwa as they are to invoke Japanese anime, Doctor Who or the crack in Johnny Cash's voice as he sings of his greatest loss, this canny authoress has brought real magic to everyday life in Jozi, in what I'm afraid I really am going to end off by descri
