I just reread this book after a few months, and frankly I'd forgotten how wonderful it was. Instead of an epic story of good and evil with a mighty hero and a wicked villain, A City Dreaming follows M, a chap who's 'in with the management', a fact which lets him be a little more relaxed about certain rules than the average person. Admittedly these rules are about things like causality, thermodynamics and indeed basic logic rather than running up a tab or getting free snacks in a bar, but the principle is the same. M tends to avoid using these advantages for anything too serious, though, at least until one of his friends comes dashing through the door with an emergency of some kind (something that seems to happen about once a week, and almost exactly once a chapter). Instead he focuses his attention on living well, with a carefree disregard for things like earning money, looking for an apartment, owning a passport, or the difficulties inherent in acquiring drugs. This is a fantastic book (in every sense of the word), something like a less serious Neil Gaiman or a more sarcastic Kate Griffin, not that those analogies are very exact since it really does stand alone. Highly recommended

A city setting and a supposed misanthropic mage could make this one of just a number of urban fantasies out there. What makes A City Dreaming different is the setting and the mage. New York with its familiar landmarks, but underneath there is a subtle difference. The magical inhabitants still interact with NY normal, but enter a particular bar, take the wrong subway car and you enter the hidden world of magic and the unusual. M, and no we do not find out his proper name, just wants a quiet life, but his friends and acquaintances all seem to just want to use him for their own ends. Yet each time the city seems to be a better place after he gets involved. Subtly dark and funny, as well as violent and scary in places. I loved the world-building and the various political shenanigans going on in the background. If you have every wondered why there are so many coffee shops you will find the explanation is here.

All the way through this book I was waiting for the story to start, waiting to find out what the overall point was. Each chapter was a little exciting blip in M's year. Introducing characters, odd occurrences around New York and revealing more of M's personality. All the way through, none of them really seemed to link, as awesome as each little adventure or problem was, the story was reading like a very bizarre biography. This did not stop me devouring it, each chapter made me go "Ahhhhhhh! This is the thing!" Then it wasn't, so I absolutely had to keep reading. I needed to know the thing, what was it building to? When the thing was revealed, every other chapter made sense. So brilliant how each chapter was made to seem insignificant when you finished it, but by the end you realise just how important each one was. A very well written, bloody clever book.

A bizarre and compelling series of short stories about M and the adventures he has in New York - the city that never sleeps but always dreams. With a very mature spun, these tales of magic and daring done are highly entertaining and I for one would love to read more by this author.

This was to be my first Polansky novel and I'd been looking forward to reading it for quite a while - it had been sitting on the top of my to-read pile waiting for me to finish Jerusalem by Alan Moore (a truly amazing, but page-heavy tome of a book). I thought the cover of A City Dreaming to be pretty stylish, the concept intriguing and could hardly wait to get stuck into the story when ... failure to launch. I managed about four chapters before this Philip Marlowe in Wonderland nonsense left me nauseated and utterly bored. It seems Polansky wants you to believe his character is that rough-edged, hard-boiled, devil-may-care-but-ultimately-good-at-heart kind of loveable rogue of the ilk that Raymond Chandler and James Crumley create so beautifully in their noir detective tales. Only it seems his sole device for achieving this is to say that his protagonist, M, sleeps with women, drinks alcohol and takes cocaine. I've got no problem with protagonists sleeping with women, drinking alcohol, nor taking cocaine, but Polansky will tell you this, from what I've seen, about once a chapter. There are some other two-dimensional characters for M to exchange bland lines of meaningless dialogue with between his bouts of taking cocaine and sleeping with women. That's about it. There may be something worthwhile in there somewhere. If so, it happens after chapter four.