Zoo City

"Down these mean streets a woman with a magic animal must go. You'll want to go there too. Lauren Beukes is Jeff Noon crossed with Raymond Chandler. What's real about the spirit of a place, in this case South Africa, previously invisible, is externalised, via magic, into features, events. Kind of genius that that's the plot too. I loved it, it's going to be huge."

– Paul Cornell

"In Zoo City we have an unfamiliar land full of familiars, a broken Johannesburg of the near-future peopled with damaged wonders. If our words are bullets, Lauren Beukes is a marksman in a world of drunken machine-gunners, firing her ideas and images into us with a sly and deadly accuracy, wasting nothing, never missing. I'll follow her career as long as she's willing to write and I'm able to read."

– Bill Willingham, creator of Fables

"While Zoo City still has an edge, it's more lyrical than Moxyland. And it has magic. Urban fantasy, for one of the most interesting definitions of the term… Moxyland was excellent. Zoo City is better."

– Gill Polack

"A pacey, hard-edged affair that is hard to put down once it's sunk its claws into you. Zoo City's a dark novel with many a silver lining. This is intelligent and witty urban writing for the 21st century: wildly entertaining, yet richly nuanced."

– Women 24