China Miéville's new novel *The Rouse*, reportedly 20 years in the making, marks a significant leap in ambition and moral seriousness compared with his earlier work, prompting the reviewer to compare him to writers such as Roberto Bolaño or Mircea Cărtărescu rather than confining him to the "new weird" genre. The sprawling book blends 1970s social realism with paranormal cold war espionage, centring on a mother's grief after her son's death and drawing the reader into a cover-up involving the army, the deep state and supernatural forces.

The novel opens with over a hundred pages of grounded realism following Maur and her son Ewan growing up in 1970s London, before Ewan dies at an army base in an apparent suicide roughly 100 pages in, after which the book—more than a thousand pages long—unfolds as an extended "coda" to that loss. Maur investigates a suspected pattern of cover-ups reminiscent of the real-life Deepcut barracks controversy, aided by a journalist, a fellow bereaved parent and a renegade ex-soldier, while a parallel strand follows Allardyce, a soldier with experience of the military's more occult operations across Malaya, Kenya, the Falklands and beyond.