The City & The City

When the body of Mahalia Geary, a foreign graduate student, turns up in the decaying city-state of Besźel, Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad expects a routine case. But solving it means confronting the strangest border in the world: Besźel and its twin city, Ul Qoma, occupy the same geographic space, and their citizens are trained from birth to "unsee" the other city and its people, on pain of the mysterious, all-powerful enforcement agency known as Breach. As Borlú's inquiry crosses into Ul Qoma and into rumours of a hidden third city, Orciny, he is drawn into a conspiracy that tests the political, perceptual and even metaphysical boundaries holding both cities together. Blending noir police procedural with weird, boundary-bending speculative fiction, China Miéville's The City & The City won the Hugo, Arthur C. Clarke, World Fantasy, BSFA and Locus Awards.