Miéville has often said, 'I'm in this business for the monsters', and The Scar contains some of his best. We gradually discover that the citizens of Armada are on a quest to harness the power of a rift in reality – the Scar, or one of the scars, of the title – but Miéville doesn't deal in fulfillment, or triumphal homecomings. His main character, Bellis Coldwine, is a lonely, withdrawn woman forced into exile: she is press-ganged onto a floating pirate city, Armada, ruled by a close-bound pair known only as the Lovers – who carve matching scars into each other's faces – and their enigmatic bodyguard, Uther Doul.

Miéville has lambasted JRR Tolkien's presentation of fantasy as a cosy 'consolation', and The Scar is anything but consoling. But it's also a world in which power is always wielded, brutally, from above. It's the second novel to be set in the Bas-Lag universe: a fantastical world in which humans, Remades (criminals punished by being surgically altered), walking cacti, women with scarab beetles for heads, 'scabmettlers' who make armour from their own congealing blood and many other wild and wonderful hybrid creatures rub alongside each other. But for world-building immersiveness and sheer rollicking readability – Miéville aimed to write, as he put it, 'the ripping yarn that is also sociologically serious and stylistically avant-garde' – it can't be beaten.

That accolade should go to The City and the City or Embassytown, books which set out from the start to discomfit and unsettle: the first playing with spatial awareness and the very ground beneath the characters' feet the second coining new vocabulary to portray an alien world and worrying at theories of language and meaning. The Scar probably isn't China Miéville's best novel.

The scar mieville