Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer
On a far-future Earth, where vast deserts - ecological disaster areas - surround walled city-states slowly losing their grip on advanced technology, the mysterious Quin manipulates biological engineering to create sentient species as both toys and manual labour. When Nicholas, a failed holo artist, decides to visit Quin, he - along with his programmer sister Nicola and her former lover, Shadrach - will discover just how dangerous it is to know Quin -- in the place known as Veniss Underground.
'A magnificently phantasmagoric account of an epic journey of discovery. It is rare to find such intense visual imagery combined with such a fast-paced and far-reaching narrative, and the alloy is as hectically exciting as it is luminously brilliant' Brian Stableford
'A dark, phantasmagoric tale . that echoes Dante's Divine Comedy, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch' Publishers Weekly