Чайна Мьевилль: The City & The City

The city is Beszel, a rundown metropolis on the eastern edge of Europe. The other city is Ul Qoma, a modern Eastern European boomtown, despite being a bit of an international pariah. What the two cities share, and what they don t, is the deliciously evocative conundrum at the heart of China Mieville s The City &amp, The City. Mieville is well known as a modern fantasist (and urbanist), but from book to book he s tried on different genres, and here he s fully hard-boiled, stripping down to a seen-it-all detective s voice that s wonderfully appropriate for this story of seen and unseen. His detective is Inspector Tyador Borlu, a cop in Beszel whose investigation of the murder of a young foreign woman takes him back and forth across the highly policed border to Ul Qoma to uncover a crime that threatens the delicate balance between the cities and, perhaps more so, Borlu s own dissolving sense of identity. In his tale of two cities, Mieville creates a world both fantastic and unsettlingly familiar, whose mysteries don t end with the solution of a murder.