It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and was ranked by Locus as the 6th all-time best fantasy novel published in the 20th century.

[a] Perdido Street Station is the first of three independent works set in the fictional world of Bas-Lag, and is followed by The Scar and Iron Council.

The UK edition was a hardcover, while the Australian version was a trade paperback; it featured a cover by Edward Miller and was marketed as a dark fantasy novel.

He is approached by Yagharek, a member of a birdlike species known as garuda, who has had his wings removed as a punishment for an undisclosed crime in his native land.

Isaac agrees and starts collecting flying creatures for research purposes with the aid of Lemuel Pigeon, a fence with links to the criminal underworld.

After reaching maturity, it emerges as a monstrous flying beast known as a slakemoth, able to paralyse its victims using hypnotic patterns on its wings.

To re-capture the slakemoths, they attempt to enlist the help of demons and the Weaver, a spider-like creature who moves through dimensions, obsessed with patterns and its own peculiar view of beauty.

Michael Moorcock, reviewing the book for The Spectator, called it "a massive and gorgeously detailed parallel-world fantasy" with "a range of rather more exotic creatures, all of whom are wonderfully drawn," and praised Mieville as "a writer with a rare descriptive gift, an unusually observant eye for physical detail, for the sensuality and beauty of the ordinarily human as well as the thoroughly alien."

However, he suggests "Mieville's determination to deliver value for money, a great page-turner, leads him to add genre borrowings which set up a misleading expectation of the kind of plot you're going to get and make individuals start behaving out of character, forcing the author into rationalisations at odds with the creative, intellectual and imaginative substance of the book.