The City & the City by China Miéville

Beszel and Ul Qoma are two cities like no others. With distinct cultures, politics, languages, politics, and histories, they do have one thing in common - by a quirk of geography they share the same space with more than the occasional overlap. To observe the other, however, is strictly forbidden and so the citizens of each city ignore the other with a fierce determination not to see. When a young woman is murdered in one city and her body dumped in the other, Inspector Tyador Borlú must cross between the two cities and find a murderer without breaking this most fundamental of taboos.

The City & the City is a speculative fiction novel that takes a police procedural and sets it in an extraordinary world where two cities exist side by side but are separated by a deeply ingrained culture of unseeing. I loved the sheer inventiveness of the setting and the light touch with which China Miéville writes. He avoids bogging down the book with exposition but instead uses small moments to bring the cities to life - for example, seeing the reflections of one city's lights in the river of the other. And yet, however surreal the setting, China Miéville also makes it seem very ordinary. This ability to make the extraordinary mundane is highlighted in a great scene near the end of a book where a detective from each city are chasing the same man but neither can arrest him because they don't know which city he is in.

While the cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma are unforgettable, the characters never really came to life for me and the mystery aspect of the book is written in fits and starts. I felt plot and characters always took second place to the world they existed in - but with such a vividly imagined and unique world I found that I didn't mind all that much.

Recommended For: People who like to read imaginative speculative fiction which challenges and intrigues

Read On: Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels are mystery novels with a similarly imaginative setting - the first one is The Eyre Affair (and comes highly recommended from me!)