The City & The City: A Novel

He read the suicide story twice against the racket of steel blades grinding single estate beans. Something rankled. There was a prolonged and dangerous-sounding hissing, and a solitary stream of espresso poured into a white cup. Edward Fellowes jumped from the bridge late on Thursday night. But there were any number of bridges along the Tyne, why w

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A quite spacious bookshop. A customer enters and approaches the counter, behind which stands an assistant. Assistant: Good morning, sir. Mr Pest: Good morning. Can you help me? Do you have a copy of Thirty Days in the Samarkand Desert with a Spoon by A. E. J. Elliott? Assistant: Um . . . well, we haven’t got it in stock, sir. Mr Pest: Never mind. H

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We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions: How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? Wha

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