Zoo city - Lauren Beukes

Lauren Beukes' Arthur C Clarke Award-winning tale of a young woman trapped in a brutal city but looking for a way out .

'A major, major talent' George R.

Martin Zinzi has a Sloth on her back, a dirty 419 scam habit and a talent for finding lost things.

But when a little old lady turns up dead and the cops confiscate her last paycheque, she's forced to take on her least favourite kind of job - missing persons.

Being hired by reclusive music producer Odi Huron to find a pop star should be her ticket out of Zoo City, the festering slum where the criminal underclass and their animal companions reside.

Instead it catapults Zinzi deeper into the maw of a city twisted by crime and magic, where she'll be forced to confront the dark secrets of former lives - including her own.

'Beukes is very *very* good.

It feels effortless, utterly accomplished' William Gibson 'Beukes brings a secret tenderness and humanity to her off-kilter portrait of the here and now' Guardian 'Exquisitely paced and impeccably controlled.

An enormously satisfying novel' New York Times Book Review.