The City and Its Uncertain Walls
Play sample
  • Published: 19 November 2024
  • ISBN: 9781787304475
  • Imprint: Harvill Secker
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 464
  • RRP: $55.00

The City and Its Uncertain Walls

Formats & editions
Hardback
19 Nov 2024
EBook
19 Nov 2024
Audiobook
19 Nov 2024
Buy from…
The Nile Mighty Ape BookHub Whitcoulls The Warehouse Paper Plus Fishpond Unity Books Find Local Retailers

The breathtaking new novel about the boundaries between worlds and individuals, from the internationally bestselling author of 1Q84.

A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a parable for these strange times.

STEP INTO THE CITY. . .

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.

A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a parable for these strange times.


PRAISE FOR HARUKI MURAKAMI

'The world's most popular cult novelist' Guardian

'Wild and thrilling. . . Murakami is a master storyteller and he knows how to keep us hooked' Sunday Times

'Totally gripping' Daily Express

'It’s safe to say that there’s no one like Murakami' Literary Review

'No other author mixes domestic, fantastic and esoteric elements into such weirdly bewitching shades' Financial Times
  • Published: 19 November 2024
  • ISBN: 9781787304475
  • Imprint: Harvill Secker
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 464
  • RRP: $55.00
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Haruki Murakami

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, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami’s unique and addictive fictional universe.

Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring Murakami’s place as one of the world’s most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

portrait photo of Haruki Murakami

Also by Haruki Murakami

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)
Sputnik Sweetheart
Norwegian Wood
A Wild Sheep Chase
Birthday Girl
Kafka on the Shore
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
See all

Praise for The City and Its Uncertain Walls

It’s safe to say that there’s no one like Murakami.

Literary Review

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

Financial Times

Murakami is a master storyteller and he knows how to keep us hooked

Sunday Times

Beguilingly enigmatic...Murakami blends science fiction, gothic novel, noir mystery, horror, and coming-of-age story... deftly weaves ordinary reality—"something you have to choose by yourself, out of several possible alternatives"—with a shadow world that is at once eerie and beautiful. Astonishing, puzzling, and hallucinatory as only Murakami can be, and one of his most satisfying tales.

Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

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

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

An enveloping magical realist story

i

A long, leisurely novel that jumps between here and there, fantasy and reality, and then and now. The result is very Murakamiesque

Herald

A 'cosy' masterpiece with agony between its lines… [The City and Its Uncertain Walls is] quietly miraculous… The greatest books…are those which enable us to enter their worlds, just as Murakami’s narrator enters his mysterious libraries

Telegraph *****

A sublime meditation on time, age and love

Woman and Home

Murakami’s favourite motifs proliferate as the boundaries between the real and unreal, conscious and unconscious, blur

Daily Mail

Murakami…stays true to form with this novel… a speculative fantasy with a faintly creepy undertow

Mail on Sunday

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

Boston Globe

Spellbinding...oddly irresistible

Wall Street Journal

[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

Mysterious, illusive… there is something about the way [Murakami] writes that is so captivating

Rumaan Alam

Ghostbustlingly alive. I was moved by [Murakami’s] portrait of impossible loss, how it can carve within us a Stygian underworld to which we are always being summoned. I even interpreted Murakami’s stinting on fictional norms as an attempt to more directly represent the self-exiling quality of melancholic grief

Junot Diaz

As we stare down social and ecological disasters, we need new ways to talk about what is real. Murakami writes most transparently about our contemporary moment toward the end of his latest novel in a reflection on the ‘pandemic of the soul.

Los Angeles Times

Haruki Murakami invented 21st-century fiction

New York Times

More than any author since Kafka, Murakami appreciates the genuine strangeness of our real world

San Francisco Chronicle

Murakami blends the whimsical and the threatening with the skill of that other pre-eminent Japanese visionary, Hayao Miyazaki

A.K. Blakemore, Guardian

A towering achievement

Hot Press Magazine.

Inventive and magical…full of rich detail

Good Housekeeping (Book of the Month)

... Mixes love, mystery and magic. This is the kind of book you think about long after you finish reading Irish Independen

Irish Independent

Discover more

Article
QUIZ: Which Murakami book should you start with?

Never read Murakami and wondering where to begin? Take this fun quiz to figure out which book you should read first.