China Mieville, The City & ytic eht

Is isbn 9781405000178, and was published in 2008, surprisingly it is 500 pages less than the last book of his I read (my blog).

At 300 pages its straight into the story about a divided city in the future. It does have a clever setup which is let down by a poor setup in writing where details drip one at a time.  If you keep at it things do become clearer.

The city has aspects of say east/west Berlin, Lebanon and mixes self censorship, and other concepts into what a person ‘sees’ or does not see even though the same space is shared through two systems of law and competing nationalist factions and some international intrigue.

4/5 bananas – an interesting writer.