Winner of the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award 2010.
A strange and compelling murder mystery set in a place like no other. In a unique and seemingly impossible land, two separate cities share the same space at the same time, the inhabitants passing every day and deliberately not seeing each other. The greatest crime is ‘Breach’, moving illegally from one city to the other, which has dire consequences. Citizens live in fear of accidentally committing it but deliberate Breach is swiftly detected and severely punished, so when a dead body from one city turns up in another it causes a special kind of headache for Inspector Borlú who must investigate without Breaching himself. A startling, intense and enthralling read from an award-winning author who has created, in his dark, detached, paranoid world, a truly amazing place.
Comparison: William Gibson, Neil Gaiman.
Maxim Jakubowski's view...
His forte is the lavish descriptions of weird, surrealistic cities and the teeming, bizarre life that inhabits them, but his latest THE CITY AND THE CITY is almost a crime novel, as an investigator delves into a murder and a cross between Chandler and Kafka arises.
| Genres: |
Urban fantasy Street fiction / urban fiction Narrative theme: Politics Narrative theme: Sense of place Crime and mystery: police procedural Speculative fiction |