Embassytown
Just a quick link to my review of China Miéville’s Embassytown in this morning’s Weekend Australian. As the review hopefully makes clear, I think it’s Miéville’s best book by some distance: brilliantly conceived, powerfully imagined, thrillingly fertile, and while I do think there’s a slight slackening in the second half, when the narrative frame opens out to take in the large-scale breakdown of the society it depicts, the first half is so good it hardly matters. All of which is a roundabout way of saying just read it, it’s fabulous.
If you’d like to know more about the book you might want to check out Justine Jordan’s profile of Miéville in last week’s Guardian, or my reviews of his last two novels, Kraken and The City and the City. And I know I’ve linked to it before, but if you’re interested you can also read an excerpt from the first chapter on the Tor website.
city of tongues 
I enjoyed your review of Embassytown almost as much as the book. I do agree it kind of lost drive about the midway point – Avice was too much of an observer – but I think it really picked up again with the Hosts’ internal and external battles to break through into a new understanding of their language and their world. A staggeringly good real SF novel.