The City & The City cover art

The City & The City

Preview

Audible Standard 30-day free trial

Try Standard free
Select 1 audiobook a month from our entire collection.
Listen to your selected audiobooks as long as you're a member.
Get unlimited access to bingeable podcasts.
Standard auto renews for £5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

The City & The City

By: China Miéville
Narrated by: John Lee
Try Standard free

£5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for £12.20

Buy Now for £12.20

About this listen

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

Fantasy Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Mystery Police Procedurals Fiction Crime

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)
No reviews yet