The City & the City

Miéville is best known as a baroque and endlessly inventive fantasist, but in this novel he harnesses his imagination to the rules and the spare language of a police procedural, which he turns inside-out with a single, intriguing twist. I won't spoil his premise, since he only gradually reveals it, but let's just say the border between the two cities in his story is unlike any you've seen before—that is, until you start to think how our own cities are divided. A wonderful and strange book that thoroughly fulfills the promise of its idea. —Tom