The City & The City - Opening

Chapter One

I COULD NOT SEE THE STREET or much of the estate. We were enclosed by dirt-coloured blocks, from windows out of which leaned vested men and women with morning hair and mugs of drink, eating breakfast and watching us. This open ground between the buildings had once been sculpted. It pitched like a golf course -- a child's mimicking of geography. Maybe they had been going to wood it and put in a pond. There was a copse but the saplings were dead.

The City & The City is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

2010 Del Rey Trade Paperback Edition

Copyright 2009 by China Mieville.

Excerpt from Kraken copyright 2010 by China Mieville

Random House reading group guide copyright 2010 Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.