num_pages: 509
description: With this outrageous new novel China Miville has written one of the strangest funniest and flat-out scariest books you will read thisor any otheryear. The London that comes to life in Kraken is a weird metropolis awash in secret currents of myth and magic where criminals police cultists and wizards are locked in a war to bring aboutor preventthe End of All Things.In the Darwin Centre at Londons Natural History Museum Billy Harrow a cephalopod specialist is conducting a tour whose climax is meant to be the Centres prize specimen of a rare Architeuthis duxbetter known as the Giant Squid. But Billys tour takes an unexpected turn when the squid suddenly and impossibly vanishes into thin air.As Billy soon discovers this is the precipitating act in a struggle to the death between mysterious but powerful forces in a London whose existence he has been blissfully ignorant of until now a city whose denizenshuman and otherwiseare adept in magic and murder.There is the Congregation of God Kraken a sect of squid worshippers whose roots go back to the dawn of humanityand beyond. There is the criminal mastermind known as the Tattoo a merciless maniac inked onto the flesh of a hapless victim. There is the FSRCthe Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unita branch of Londons finest that fights sorcery with sorcery. There is Wati a spirit from ancient Egypt who leads a ragtag union of magical familiars. There are the Londonmancers who read the future in the citys entrails. There is Grisamentum Londons greatest wizard whose shadow lingers long after his death. And then there is Goss and Subby an ageless old man and a cretinous boy who together constitute a terrifyingyet darkly charismaticdemonic duo.All of themand othersare in pursuit of Billy who inadvertently holds the key to the missing squid an embryonic god whose powers properly harnessed can destroy all that is was and ever shall be.
language: English
title: Kraken
publisher: Del Rey