The City & the City
Hugo Award 2010, Arthur C. Clarke Award 2010, World Fantasy Award 2010, British Science Fiction Association Award 2010, Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel 2010. Nebula Award nominee 2009, Tähtivaeltaja award nominee 2012, Tähtifantasia award nominee 2012.
New York Times bestselling author China Miéville delivers his most accomplished novel yet, an existential thriller set in a city unlike any other – real or imagined.
When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have imagined.
Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own. This is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a shift in perception, a seeing of the unseen. His destination is Beszel’s equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the rich and vibrant city of Ul Qoma. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, and struggling with his own transition, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of rabid nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them and those they care about more than their lives.
What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities.
Casting shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984, The City & the City is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.
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China Miéville
China Tom Miéville (born 1972) is an English fantasy fiction author, comic writer and academic. He is fond of describing his fiction as "weird fiction" (after early 20th-century pulp and horror writers such as H. P. Lovecraft), and belongs to a loose group of writers sometimes called New Weird.
He is active in left-wing politics as a member of the International Socialist Organization (US) and formerly a member of the Socialist Workers Party (UK) until resigning in 2013 over the SWP internal crisis about allegations of rape against 'Comrade Delta'. In 2013 he became a founding member of Left Unity. He stood for Regent's Park and Kensington North for the Socialist Alliance in the 2001 UK General election. He published his PhD thesis on Marxism and international law as a book in 2005. He teaches creative writing at Warwick University, and in 2012–13 he was Writer-in-Residence at Roosevelt University in Chicago, Illinois.
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