The City & The City

By: China Mieville

Narrated by: John Lee

Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

New York Times best-selling author China Miéville delivers his most accomplished novel yet, an existential thriller set in a city unlike any other, real or imagined.

When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have imagined.

Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own. This is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a shift in perception, a seeing of the unseen. His destination is Beszel's equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the rich and vibrant city of Ul Qoma.

With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, and struggling with his own transition, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of rabid nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman's secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them and those they care about more than their lives.

What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities.

Casting shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984, The City & The City is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.

• Hugo Award, Best Novel, 2010

©2009 China Mieville (P)2009 Random House

Critic reviews

"Daring and disturbing...Miéville illuminates fundamental and unsettling questions about culture, governance and the shadowy differences that keep us apart." (Walter Mosley, author of Devil in a Blue Dress)

"Lots of books dabble in several genres but few manage to weld them together as seamlessly and as originally as The City and The City. In a tale set in a series of cities vertiginously layered in the same space, Miéville offers the detective novel re-envisioned through the prism of the fantastic. The result is a stunning piece of artistry that has both all the satisfactions of a good mystery and all the delight and wonder of the best fantasy.” (Brian Evenson, author of Last Days)

"Mr. Miéville's novels - seven so far - have been showered with prizes; three have won the Arthur C. Clarke award, given annually to the best science fiction novel published in Britain…. [H]e stands out from the crowd for the quality, mischievousness and erudition of his writing…. Among the many topics that bubble beneath the wild imagination at play are millennial anxiety, religious cults, the relationship between the citizen and the state and the role of fate and free will." (The New York Times)

Utterly Fascinating Mediocrity

Concept: Stunning, Intriguing
Characters: Very good
Writing Style: Unique though difficult to follow at times.
Performance: Serviceable, hard to tell who's speaking in chaotic scenes.
Story: Meh...

A layered mystery; but only half is the crime

A murder investigation that would be enough on its own, but set in a socio-political fantasy world as good as good as any High Fantasy classic you love.
Well written, well preformed.
I really enjoyed this.

Beautifully confusing yet easy to understand

This is a fairly straightforward cop procedural about a dead woman but in a strange city. The world of this book is utterly fascinating and the politics of two cities growing into each other but being politically distinct is somehow both easy to understand and utterly alien.

Confusing, astonish and very amusing

Two cities in the same geographical location where the residents live side by side by un-seeing each other, ignoring each other. This is confusing to begin with and of course makes you think of the Berlin wall, but somehow China Mieville makes it work and we run along side Inspector Borlu as he investigates a crime spanning across the two cities.

excellent book & audible did the right thing

WoW!
When I purchased this book it cost me TWO credits BUT audible said that was an error and REFUNDED me a credit what a STAND UP THING TO DO!
Now about this book wow a great book a sci-fi police story! Hooks you from the start. Pay attention now, no falling asleep while listening.

Solving Mysteries while Failing to Fail to See

The City and the City is a fascinating book, a first-person hardboiled political police procedural occurring in a Kafka-esque architecture. The science fictional conceit of The City and the City--worked out with impressive detail--is that there are these two Eastern-European-ish cities existing not side by side ala East and West Berlin but intertwined or fused together with "crosshatch" areas held in common and other areas divided between the two cities. Citizens of one city are mentally conditioned from birth to unsee and unsense citizens and things of the other city so that if the house of your neighbor is in the other city, you might live your whole life and never see, hear, smell, or otherwise communicate with or interact with your neighbor.

If you can accept that strange situation, you will be in for an absorbing and suspenseful mystery novel. The crime that opens the novel, like in all good stories in the genre, exfoliates and ramifies into more important political and unsettling existential matters than the apparent brutal murder of a prostitute by a crazy customer.

The City and the City was not an easy listen for me, because of the many unfamiliar names (Beszel, Al Qoma, Borlu, Corwi, Dhatt, Buric, Mahalia, etc.) and because of the bizarre situation. But John Lee does his usual intelligent, smooth, sensitive, and restrained job reading it, and it is stimulating to imagine living in a place like those conjoined cities, which enable Mieville to make provocative play with the degree to which our (often xenophobic) perceptions of the world and ourselves and others are culturally conditioned into us from birth and the degree to which we therefore learn to unconsciously ignore uncomfortable facts.

Fabulous

A perfect fantasy novel. Mieville creates a bizarre setting and makes it feel completely plausible. He then explores every possible permutation of it, drawing out the richness in the central conceit. It's a tour de force.

The reader is slightly irritating at first - he keeps pausing before the some of the hard-to-pronounce words - but you'll get used to his odd diction, and in a way it rather suits the novel, giving it a sense of foreignness.

China Mieville takes you to places that never were

I confess to being completely baffled by the first few chapters of the book: maybe I hadn't read the flyleaf or maybe I'm just dumb. But when I figured out that the City and the City occupy the same geographical space and how and what it meant to breach, I was captivated. The idea of two interlaced and superposed solitudes blew me away, and to tie a murder mystery into the mix absolutely brilliant. I would read this book again and I've recommended the author to many, and so I'm doing it to you too.

Interesting idea.

I mean it's not Fahrenheit 451, but it's worth a listen. There is a hyper-emphasis on human interaction and thought. The environment is described almost entirely through the characters' psychological experience of it. This is a book about perception, obviously, but every part of it is about perception. It is internally harmonious, and there are some great morsels of description in it.

Narration is good. It's a good buy. Four stars all around.

Well, that was different!

I really like China Mieville and have enjoyed his books and stories. This has an intriguing premise but didn’t quite get me to accept the misdirection even while giving my suspension of disbelief quite a workout. There is something so meta about the world that I found interesting but hard to fully identify. Overall however, it was a fun listen and John Lee was, as always, a great narrator.