Award-winning author China Miéville plunges us into the year the world was turned upside down
China Miéville is the multi-award-winning author of many works of fiction and non-fiction. His fiction includes The City & The City, Embassytown and This Census-Taker, and has won the Hugo, World Fantasy and Arthur C Clarke Awards; his non-fiction includes the photo-illustrated essay London's Overthrow, and Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law. He has a PhD in International Relations from the LSE. He has written for various publications, including the New York Times, The Guardian, Conjunctions and Granta. He is a founding editor of the quarterly Salvage. He has been a fellow of the McDowell Colony, the Lannan Foundation, and the Rockefeller Bellagio Center, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Miéville is an ideal guide through this complex historical moment,
giving agency to obscure and better-known participants alike, and
depicting the revolution as both a tragically lost opportunity and
an ongoing source of inspiration.
*Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)*
When one of the most marvellously original writers in the world
takes on one of the most explosive events in history, the result
can only be incendiary.
*Barbara Ehrenreich*
This gripping account is a re-enactment of the Russian Revolution
... His writing can be as passionate as that of the poets of the
time: Alexander Blok, Mikhail Kuzmin, Marina Tsvetaeva, to mention
some of those quoted here. Miéville's own special effects are of a
piece with them.
*Financial Times*
An intriguing march to revolution, told here with clarity and
insight.
*Kirkus*
Readers will be satisfied that October gives them the literary
equivalent of bearing witness to world history.
*Booklist*
To give a new generation of readers a fresh account of the great
revolution, incorporating all the post-1989 archival discoveries
and scholarly research, is a singularly daunting task. To render it
in vivid, oracular prose, moving across the pages with the
gathering force of a hurricane, is something that only China
Miéville could achieve.
*Mike Davis*
Elegantly constructed and unexpectedly moving
*London Review of Books*
There are delightful grace notes here over and above a brisk and
perceptive narrative.
*Scotsman*
Cinematic and vivid
*Newsweek*
It's as if John Reed, author of the classic piece of revolutionary
journalism, Ten Days That Shook the World, woke from a decades-long
sleep to tell the story of 1917 once again.
*Counterpunch*
Best Summer Books of 2017.
*Publishers Weekly*
Miéville sifts through the extraordinary disagreements, debates,
and debacles that accompanied the Russian reds on every step of the
road to revolution ... He's especially evocative when he chronicles
the scenes on the chaotic streets. But much of the value of October
comes in his mastery of how the intricacies of human
decision-making play out in Petrograd, Moscow, and beyond.
*Christian Science Monitor*
An exciting account of the revolutionary moment... well-argued and
elegiac
*Spectator*
[An] engaging retelling of the events that rocked the foundations
of the twentieth century.
*Village Voice*
In October, Miéville provides an introduction to one of the seminal
events of the 20th century-the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty and
the establishment of the world's first communist state 100 years
ago this year ... It has all the makings of a novel, and Miéville's
narrative builds toward its crescendo as the Bolsheviks prepare to
take power.
*Boston Globe*
Miéville's understanding of the intricacies and underlying
absurdities of party politics is unmatched... A rich and compelling
book.
*Dallas Morning News*
This is a very fine book-in some ways, I believe, the best work
that China Miéville has produced since the three thick volumes of
the Bas-Lag trilogy. Indeed, October bears, in certain respects, a
deeper affinity to those novels than to anything else he has
published since; and it thus provides a convenient opportunity to
take stock of the Miéville oeuvre to date...That [October] is an
excellent work of art there is no doubt whatever.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
Miéville, known for his extravagantly weird science fiction and
fantasy, is a virtuosic storyteller; here he conjures a society
convulsing on the verge of total transformation while staying
squarely within the lines of the historical record. Reading this
blow-by-blow account of revolution now, when political life is
stranger than any fiction, is galvanizing.
*Artsy*
There are workers, there are peasants, there are soldiers, there
are parties, there are tsars, there are courtiers. Each of them
bears his or her class position, his or her economic and other
concerns, but it is the political field itself, how it hurls its
protagonists into combat, combat with its own rules and norms, its
own criteria for success and failure, that is front and center
here. This may be the most textured, most concrete, account of what
political contest and political combat, literal and metaphoric,
feels like.
*Corey Robin*
October's dramatic narrative makes the case that the effort is
still worth it - that we must dare to dream, even if we risk
conjuring more nightmares in this darkening world.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
As an outstanding piece of literature, China Miéville's October
belongs on the same shelf as John Reed's eyewitness classic Ten
Days That Shook the World, but even more it belongs in the hands of
activists who will be shaking the world in the twenty-first
century.
*International Socialist Review*
There is interest in reading the story of 'that violent and
incomparable year' told by one who hopes against hope that it could
happen again.
*Irish Times*
China Miéville's literary retelling-made to feel like a novel, but
scrupulously sourced to real events-captures the vertigo of 1917's
encounter between massive historical forces, plunging us back into
the heart of a far-reaching social upheaval, in which time flowed
backward and forward even as it marched inexorably forward toward a
future that was radically unknown.
*The New Republic*
Even though you know the ending, this is a compulsive page-turner
that makes the period come alive in rich, colourful detail.
Although he is better known for his science fiction, Miéville's eye
here fleshes out both the spirit of revolution and the horrors that
followed. His feelings are evidently complex, which leads to a
narrative that draws out elements often left out of more
traditional renderings of the Revolution.
*Times Higher Education*
A century on, the nature of the Russian Revolution remains hotly
contested, both within and outside of leftist circles. Miéville, a
master storyteller, makes a powerful case in his first nonfiction
work that the Bolsheviks' October success should not be disavowed
as the onset of disaster but looked to as an inspirational moment
in a grand narrative of human liberation.
*Publishers Weekly*
Named One of the Best Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly
*Publishers Weekly*
The story is old but Miéville retells it with verve and empathy. He
brilliantly captures the tensions of coup and counter-coup and the
kaleidoscope of coalitions that formed and then broke.
*Guardian*
An inspirational account that lends itself to troubled times.
*Observer*
October, by the British author China Miéville, is a gripping
account of the Russian Revolution that offers the pleasures and
rewards of a great novel ... The book has vividly drawn characters,
high drama, suspense, and an irresistible narrative momentum that
sweeps the reader along from the first page to the tragic - but not
inevitable - conclusion ... a masterful work.
*Pop Matters*
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