The City & The City

The City & The City is a novel by the British writer China Miéville, published by Macmillan in 2009. It combines a police procedural with the fantastic, and it won several major awards in both fields, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the World Fantasy Award.

Inspector Tyador Borlú works in the Extreme Crime Squad of Besźel, a city-state in eastern Europe, and his case is the death of Mahalia Geary, a foreign student found in a Besźel street with her face disfigured. Borlú learns that she had been caught up in the politics and culture of the quarrel between Besźel and Ul Qoma, the city that occupies the same geographic space.

The two cities are one place and two places at once. Their citizens live side by side and are forbidden to see one another, to look at the wrong buildings or to acknowledge the wrong streets, and the discipline that keeps them apart is enforced by a body with wide powers. Borlú's investigation begins at home and takes him across into Ul Qoma, where the rules are the same and everything else is different.