The City & the City

The body of a young woman is found on a housing estate in Besźel, a shabby European city of crumbling grandeur, and Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad takes the case. It should be routine. It is not, because Besźel shares its geography with Ul Qoma, a second city occupying the same streets, the same junctions, sometimes the same buildings, and the citizens of each are trained from childhood to unsee the other. To look directly at what belongs to the neighbouring city is Breach, the gravest offence there is, policed by a power that answers to nobody. Borlú's investigation drags him across the border by every legitimate route and forces him into contact with Ul Qoman detectives, nationalist agitators, unificationists, and academics chasing rumours of a third city hidden between the two. Miéville writes the whole thing as a hard-edged police procedural, letting the astonishing premise sit in the background as ordinary municipal fact, and the effect is to make the reader complicit in the same trained blindness. What begins as a murder inquiry becomes a study of how borders live in the mind rather than on the ground.