My son recommended this book to me as well as Perdido Street Station by the same author. I love the unusual story and the dynamic writing. It is an astonishing book, very well written.Book Review from Mysteries You Might Have Missed Along the Way by Nancy Pearl, NPR:"China Mieville's The City and the City is a police procedural set in neighboring, nearly identical fictional cities. The catch is, these cities — Beszel and Ul Qoma — co-exist in the same physical space, and their separation ultimately depends on how well each city's citizens do in ignoring the existence of the other. Sound a little complicated? Leave it to Mieville to make it work superbly.Police Inspector Tyador Borlu is assigned to find the murderer of student Mahalia Geary. She was a member of an extremist group who believed that there is actually a third city — Orciny — that exists in the interstices of the first two. As more murders occur, Borlu is reluctantly forced to consider that the outlandish views Geary held might actually contain some truth. But with Mieville, weird as the plots of his novels might sound, it's actually the setting that seems to matter most to him, and, ultimately, the reader. While I was engrossed in this quite compelling mystery, I found myself thinking of the many parallels that Mieville's notion of separate cities (each with a different currency, economic level, religion, governmental structure and ways of life) that are separated only by a longstanding habit of belief, have in the modern world. One could (and perhaps should) read this as a parable of segregation reduced to its most elemental form. You might have to work a bit harder with a book like this — maybe read it more than once — but it's totally worth it."
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