Miéville, C: City & The City

In the moment I woke it was without a sense of time having passed. I closed my eyes in the crosshatched streets of the Old Towns; I opened them again and gasped for breath . . . 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 Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But, as he probes, the evidence begins to point to conspiracies far more unusual, and far more deadly, than anything he could have imagined. Soon his work puts him and those he cares for in danger. Borlú must travel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own, across a border like no other.Winnerof the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and with shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and George Orwell, The City & The City is an indisputable modern classic - a thriller of dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.'An eye-opening genre-buster. The names of Kafka and Orwell tend to be invoked too easily for anything a bit out of the ordinary, but in this case they are worthy comparisons' The Times'An exceptional novel: audacious, original and haunting' Daily Mail