The City & The City

Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad in Besźel, a decaying city-state, is handed the body of Mahalia Geary, a foreign graduate student. He expects a routine case. The investigation soon shows him otherwise.

Besźel shares its geographic space with a twin city, Ul Qoma. Citizens of each are trained from birth to unsee the other place and its people, and anyone who fails answers to Breach, a mysterious and all-powerful enforcement agency. Borlú has lived by this rule all his life, and solving the murder means dealing with it head on.

The inquiry carries him across the border into Ul Qoma, where talk turns to Orciny, a hidden third city. A conspiracy pulls him in, and it presses on the political, perceptual and even metaphysical limits that keep the two cities apart.

The book is a noir police procedural built on weird, boundary-bending speculative fiction. The detective plot supplies the structure, while the invented geography supplies the strangeness. It won the Hugo, Arthur C. Clarke, World Fantasy, BSFA and Locus Awards.