Railsea
A Novel
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
“Other names besides [Herman] Melville’s will surely come to mind as you read this thrilling tale—there’s Dune’s Frank Herbert. . . . But in this, as in all of his works, Miéville has that special knack for evoking other writers even while making the story wholly his own.”—Los Angeles Times
On board the moletrain Medes, Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe as he witnesses his first moldywarpe hunt: the giant mole bursting from the earth, the harpoonists targeting their prey, the battle resulting in one’s death & the other’s glory. Spectacular as it is, Sham can’t shake the sense that there is more to life than the endless rails of the railsea—even if his captain thinks only of hunting the ivory-colored mole that took her arm years ago. But when they come across a wrecked train, Sham finds something—a series of pictures hinting at something, somewhere, that should be impossible—that leads to considerably more than he’d bargained for. Soon he’s hunted on all sides, by pirates, trainsfolk, monsters & salvage-scrabblers. & it might not be just Sham’s life that’s about to change. It could be the whole of the railsea.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“[Miéville] gives all readers a lot to dig into here, be it emotional drama, Godzilla-esque monster carnage, or the high adventure that comes only with riding the rails.”—USA Today
“Superb . . . massively imaginative.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Riveting . . . a great adventure.”—NPR
“Wildly inventive . . . Every sentence is packed with wit.”—The Guardian (London)
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A vast web of railroad tracks weaves across the landscape in China Miéville’s latest fantastical story, and like a fishing boat carving through the seas, moletrains race along them, hunting gigantic moles known as moldywarpes. As a young apprentice named Sham gets used to life aboard the train, a vividly imagined and utterly original world takes shape. Right when you have a firm grasp of it, an unexpected discovery upends Sham’s life and triggers a larger sea-change among the trainsfolk. The unconventional writing style pushes boundaries without becoming florid or impenetrable, and this wildly inventive tale of wonder and revelation marks another impressive accomplishment by Miéville.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mi ville (Un Lun Dun) returns to YA fiction with a superb, swashbuckling tale of adventure on the railsea, a vast prairie densely crisscrossed by train tracks: "Tracks & ties, in the random meanders of geography & ages, in all directions. Extending forever." Sham, an orphan, has gone to railsea as apprentice to a train's doctor. That train, the Medes, is a moletrain that plies the railsea hunting the great moldywarpes (giant moles) that live beneath the dirt, harpooning the subterranean creatures when they surface and rendering them down for meat, fat, and fur to be sold on the mainland. The train's captain, Naphi, is a strange, charismatic woman who lost her arm to an enormous ivory mole, Mocker-Jack; obsessed with killing the creature, she's willing to sail to the mythical ends of the railsea to catch him. Working variations on such classics as Moby-Dick, Robinson Crusoe, and A Wizard of Earthsea, this massively imaginative and frequently playful novel features eccentric characters, amazing monsters, and, at its heart, an intense sense of wonder. Ages 12 up.
