China Miéville's new novel, The City & the City, gets starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist.

Denise Hamilton:

If Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler's love child were raised by Franz Kafka, the writing that emerged might resemble China Miéville's new novel, "The City & the City."

Miéville's protagonist is Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad of Beszel, a fictional city-state that Miéville locates in southeastern Europe. The place is drab, the people glum, the culture a faded pastiche of Ottoman, Slav, Byzantine and Austro-Hungarian Mitteleuropa. It's a decaying, depressed world reminiscent of the 1949 film "The Third Man," where shadows, paranoia, secrecy and unseen forces reign.

Then things get really twisty.

Beszel has a ghostly and unacknowledged doppelgänger, a city-state called Ul Qoma that overlaps, or "crosshatches," with its twin, and it soon becomes clear that the dead girl has come from this mirror place whose very existence is a crime to acknowledge.

Mark Steyn:

There is literally no language in which what’s happening in suburban Maryland can be politely discussed.

David Kolb, on sprawl:

Are we imprisoned in a universal Disneyland?

Jonathan Franzen:

The technological development that has done lasting harm of real social significance -- the development that, despite the continuing harm it does, you risk ridicule if you publicly complain about today -- is the cell phone.

Bruce Sterling:

"Poor folk love their cellphones!"

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