The City & The City (Paperback)

Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel 2010

Winner of the BSFA Award for Best Novel 2009

Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2010

Winner of the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel 2010

Winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel 2010

'As in no previous novel, the author celebrates and enhances the genre he loves and has never rejected. On many levels this novel is a testament to his admirable integrity.' - Michael Moorcock, The Guardian

When the body of a murdered woman is found in the extraordinary, decaying city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks like a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he probes, the evidence begins to point to conspiracies far stranger, and more deadly, than anything he could have imagined.

Soon his work puts him and those he cares for in danger. Borlu must travel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own, across a border like no other... 

Like China Miéville’s debut Perdido Street Station, The City and the City is a virtuosic display of imagination and writerly skill, but not at the expense of a rich and involving story rooted within the conventions of the detective genre.  Miéville confidently and quite brilliantly pulls off the conceit of two cities weaved within each other, with only the shadowy members of the Breach enjoying total oversight. Although critical allusions to both Kafka and Philip K. Dick have been made, the author here speaks with very much his own voice, conjuring a certain kind of eastern European noir, pitched somewhere between the future and the past.

Now adapted for BBC 2 by screenwriter Tony Grisoni and directed by Tom Shankland.