The City & The City

By: China Miéville

Narrated by: John Lee

Read by the incredible John Lee

Winner of the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, a World Fantasy award, and a BSFA Award.

Blending weird fiction with the police procedural, The City & The City is an existential thriller like no other.


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 stranger, and 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.

With shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984, the multi-award-winning The City & The City by China Miéville is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.

'As intelligent as he is original' – The Guardian

‘There is no one else writing stuff like this.’ – Dazed

Critic reviews

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

There is no one else writing stuff like this

As intelligent as he is original

Audacious, original and haunting

Daring and disturbing (Walter Mosley, author of the bestselling Easy Rawlins Mysteries series)