‘This is the end,’ we are told about a hundred pages into The Rouse. ‘Now everything else is codas.’ Which might come as a surprise, given that there are still well over a thousand pages to go. But those opening hundred pages have told the story of a life – and life, as one character later muses, ‘is just a prologue to a ghost story’. 

For the most part, the g-word is strenuously avoided in The Rouse, China Miéville’s first full novel in fourteen years (discounting The Book of Elsewhere, his 2024 collaboration with Keanu Reeves). Miéville, a three-time winner of the Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction, has described The Rouse as his ‘white whale’. It is certainly a leviathan of a novel – so thick that review proofs had to be split in half.

The book has two narrative strands. One follows Maur, first a child without a mother, then a mother without a child. She is nineteen in 1973, when she becomes pregnant after a one-night stand and moves to London with no job and little money for her baby, whom she names