The City and Its Uncertain Walls

What will you find in the city?

READERS LOVE THE CITY AND ITS UNCERTAIN WALLS

‘Felt like stepping into a dream’
‘I really loved getting lost in this book’
‘Everyone on this planet should read Murakami at least once in their lifetime’
‘Riveting and irresistible’
‘It’s magical, it’s wise . . . deeply comforting’
A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, a breathtaking new novel about the boundaries between worlds and individuals, from the Sunday Times bestseller.

When a young man’s girlfriend mysteriously vanishes, he sets his heart on finding the imaginary city where her true self lives. His search will lead him to take a job in a remote library with mysteries of its own.

When he finally makes it to the walled city, a shadowless place of horned beasts and willow trees, he finds his beloved working in a different library – a dream library. But she has no memory of their life together in the other world and, as the lines between reality and fantasy start to blur, he must decide what he’s willing to lose.

Review

A masterpiece... quietly miraculous… The greatest books…are those which enable us to enter their worlds, just as Murakami’s narrator enters his mysterious libraries ― Telegraph *****

No other author mixes domestic, fantastic and esoteric elements into such weirdly bewitching shades. ― Financial Times

Regular readers will delight in the Easter eggs nested in an unsettling quest spun from Murakami’s long-patented dream logic ― Observer, Best Novels Autumn 2024

An enveloping magical realist story ― i

A mysterious, magical book that reveals itself like a secret being said. Murakami offers a beguiling look at self and the lengths we go to for love ― Hanako Footman, author of MONGREL

[Murakami’s] imagination is one of a kind, and his blend of pop culture, postmodernism and Japanese mythology is a wholly unique contribution to literature ― Washington Post

Murakami blends the whimsical and the threatening with the skill of that other pre-eminent Japanese visionary, Hayao Miyazaki -- A.K. Blakemore ― Guardian

Spellbinding...oddly irresistible ― Wall Street Journal

A sublime meditation on time, age and love ― Woman and Home

One of his best. It feels at once sweeping and intimate, grand and tender, quiet and charged with feeling ― Boston Globe

About the Author

Haruki Murakami (Author)
In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon.

In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Men Without Women, Murakami's distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring his place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

Philip Gabriel (Translator)
Philip Gabriel is the author of Mad Wives and Island Dreams: Shimao Toshio and the Margins of Japanese Literature and Spirit Matters: The Transcendent in Modern Japanese Literature and has translated many novels and short stories by the writer Haruki Murakami and other modern writers. He is recipient of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature (2001) for his translation of Senji Kuroi’s Life in the Cul-de-Sac, and the 2006 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for his translation of Murakami's Kafka on the Shore.