Weaving together the historical & the imagined China Mieville's The Last Days of New Paris is a surreal & extraordinary work from the author of The City & The City 1941 In the chaos of wartime Marseille American engineer & occult disciple Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group including Surrealist theorist Andre Breton In the strange games of dissident diplomats exiled revolutionaries & avant-garde artists Parsons finds & channels hope But what he unwittingly unleashes is the power of dreams & nightmares changing the war & the world for ever 1950 A lone Surrealist fighter Thibaut walks a new hallucinogenic Paris where Nazis & the Resistance are trapped in unending conflict & the streets are stalked by living images & texts
- & by the forces of Hell To escape the city Thibaut must join forces with Sam an American photographer intent on recording the ruins & make common cause with a powerful enigmatic figure of chance & rebellion the exquisite corpse But Sam is being hunted & new secrets will emerge that will test all their loyalties
- to each other to Paris old & new & to reality itself