This Census-Taker

About this book

For readers of George Saunders Kelly Link David Mitchell and Karen Russell This Census-Taker is a stunning uncanny and profoundly moving novella from multiple-award-winning and bestselling author China Miville. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR In a remote house on a hilltop a lonely boy witnesses a profoundly traumatic event. He triesand failsto flee. Left alone with his increasingly deranged parent he dreams of safety of joining the other children in the town below of escape. When at last a stranger knocks at his door the boy senses that his days of isolation might be over. But by what authority does this man keep the meticulous records he carries? What is the purpose behind his questions? Is he friend? Enemy? Or something else altogether? Filled with beauty terror and strangeness This Census-Taker is a poignant and riveting exploration of memory and identity. Praise for This Census-Taker China Miville is a magician . . . who can both blow your mind with ideas as big as the universe and break your heart with language so precise and polished its like hes writing with diamonds.NPR The book haunts the reader; what actually happened seems always just out of reach glimpsed in shadow as it rounds a corner ahead of our vision.Los Angeles Review of Books Mievilles been compared to Karen Russell and George Saunders and rightfully so.The Huffington Post Marvellous.The Guardian Lingers in the mind like an unsettling dream.Financial Times A thought-provoking fairy tale for adults . . . This Census-Taker resembles the narrative style quirkiness and plotting found in the works of Karen Russell Aimee Bender or Steven Millhauser.Booklist Brief and dreamlike . . . a deceptively simple story whose plot could be taken as a symbolic representation of an aspect of humanity as big as an entire society and as small as a single soul.Kirkus Reviews