The Last Days of New Paris

 The Last Days of New Paris by China Mieville, 209 pages.

This book is difficult to categorize and even more difficult to describe, but I will do my best here. In 1941, while the Nazis were occupying Paris, a strange bomb went off. The so called S-Blast filled the city with physical and uncontrollable manifestations of Surrealist art. Between the so-called manifs and the demons the Nazis summon to attempt to maintain control, Paris is rendered strange and unstable, as well as being totally cut off from the rest of the world.

The story bounces back and forth between a solitary Surrealist soldier trying to resist the occupying Nazis in 1950 and a house full of Surrealists resisting in their own, more cognitive, way before the S-Blast. This book was extremely weird, but I found it very compelling throughout. I think fans of the Surrealist movement in particular will love this novel (and it's extensive index of references), but I enjoyed it as someone who knows little of the movement as well. This is a short book that packs a lot in with a startling degree of complexity, and I would recommend it for people feeling like they want to read something different.