China Miéville

Avice Benner Cho, a human colonist on a distant planet populated by the Ariekei, sentient beings famed for their unique language, returns to Embassytown after many years of deep space exploration to find she has become a living simile in the Ariekei language even though she cannot speak it, and she is torn by competing loyalties when hostilities erupt between humans and aliens.

Being chased by cults, a maniac, and the sorcerers of the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit, cephalopod specialist Billy Harrow inadvertently learns that he holds the key to finding a missing squid--a squid that just happens to be an embryonic god whose powers, properly harnessed, can destroy all that is, was, and ever shall be.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE SEATTLE TIMES, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.
 
When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. To investigate, Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to its equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the vibrant city

...

" 'Beauty will be convulsive.' A thriller of war that never was--of survival in an impossible city--of surreal cataclysm. In The Last Days of New Paris, China Mieville entwines true historical events and people with his daring, uniquely imaginative brand of fiction, reconfiguring history and art into something new. 1941. In the chaos of wartime Marseille, American engineer--and occult disciple--Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group,...

A warrior who cannot be killed, known simply as "B", wants to die and a U.S. black-ops group has promised they can help with that if he helps them in return, but when an all-too-mortal soldier comes back to life, the impossible event points to a force even more mysterious than B himself.

From the Publisher: Long acknowledged as a master of nightmarish visions, H. P. Lovecraft established the genuineness and dignity of his own pioneering fiction in 1931 with his quintessential work of supernatural horror, At the Mountains of Madness. The deliberately told and increasingly chilling recollection of an Antarctic expedition's uncanny discoveries-and their encounter with untold menace in the ruins of a lost civilization-is a milestone...

“Other names besides [Herman] Melville’s will surely come to mind as you read this thrilling tale—there’s Dune’s Frank Herbert. . . . But in this, as in all of his works, Miéville has that special knack for evoking other writers even while making the story wholly his own.”—Los Angeles Times
 
On board the moletrain Medes, Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in...

"Monsters possess transformative powers, rendering them at once profoundly dangerous and utterly fascinating. Medieval Monsters explores the cultural importance and rich variety of monstrosities in the art of the Middle Ages, with examples drawn from the Morgan Library & Museum's renowned collection of illuminated manuscripts. While presenting a lively array of strange beauties and frightful anomalies--demons and dragons, centaurs, and unicorns--the...