Oliver Arditi's review of Mordew (Cities of the Weft, #1)

5/5: Alex Pheby's Mordew immerses the reader immediately in a deeply peculiar and mysterious world. It is clearly indebted to Mervyn Peake, both in its involute, tenebrous prose, and in its baroque world-building. Like Peake's Gormenghast trilogy it is set in a world with clear similarities to our own, but one which is equally clearly other. It bears many cultural and linguistic resemblances to Victorian England, and its inhabitants are aware of the qualities of Frenchness and Irishness, but none of those places has any clear geographic presence. The city of Mordew itself is stated to have been ...