Murder and morality meet sci-fi in this fun novel

Gautam Bhatia's 'The Sentence' is a murder mystery that wears its erudition and analysis of justice lightly

- Shrabonti Bagchi

In speculative fiction writer China Mieville's novel The City and the City (2009), a police inspector in the fictional East European city-state of Besźel investigates the murder of a student involved in political turmoil between his nation and its "twin city", Ul Qoma—two separate social, cultural and political entities that exist parallelly, often occupying the same geographical space, but divided by harsh, unbreachable laws that ask residents of both cities to "unsee" the other. It is a fantastical, heartbreaking novel that examines the idea of how people who occupy the same physical space may often experience it in spectacularly different ways, to the extent that they seem to exist in parallel universes.

The Sentence by Gautam Bhatia—lawyer, constitutional law expert and the author of the science-fiction duology The Wall and The Horizon, both set in a walled city-state bound by rigid rules—is, at first glance, about a world similar to Mieville's. Here, too, there are two city-states that once made up the great city of Peruma before it was partitioned into two distinct political entities—the Council and the Commune—who struck a deal to co-exist in a sort of limbo for 100 years before deciding their individual and collective futures. Here, too, is a murder, which took place 100 years ago, at the time the cities were divided, and must be investigated.

There may be other echoes of Mieville's novel here, but The Sentence feels painfully urgent in a way that