The City and Its Uncertain Walls
The Sunday Times bestselling novel from the author of 1Q84 and Norwegian Wood
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4.4 • 16 Ratings
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
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.
'A love letter to books, libraries and librarians' Financial Times, Books of the Year
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
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A girl’s disappearance haunts the boy who loved her in a novel that blends mystery, science fiction and magical realism into one stunning coming-of-age tale. Two teenagers are in love, but the girl claims her real self lives in a fantastical walled city filled with magical creatures and strange rules. When she tragically disappears, part of the boy wonders...did she find a way to go there? Years later, after the boy becomes a middle-aged man, he decides to find out. Haruki Murakami centres this tale around classic themes of ageing, loneliness and spiritual transcendence. The plot is simultaneously fast and slow, and the writing is both expansive and dense—all of which makes the whole thing feel like wandering through a beautiful dream. With lush, vivid imagery and enigmatic prose, The City and Its Uncertain Walls will leave you with a grand sense of wonder.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Murakami (Killing Commendatore) unspools an intoxicating fantasy of a parallel world. The unnamed middle-aged narrator recounts how, at 17, he fell in love with a 16-year-old girl who told him of a walled city in which her "real" self lives. At her invitation he wills himself into this world and takes a job as a Dream Reader at a library where the shelves are stocked with dreams, which he describes as "echoes of the minds left behind by real people." The narrator then loses contact with the girl and the alternate world and embarks on an ordinary life, first as a businessman in Tokyo, then as head of a small library in an unnamed mountainous town. The ingenuity of Murakami's tale lies in the resonances he establishes between the two worlds through depictions of an assistant librarian who calls to mind the narrator's youthful girlfriend, a mentor who might be an elderly reflection of the narrator himself, and a 16-year-old boy who forms an obsessive interest in the narrator's descriptions of the walled city. Even as Murakami forges a bridge between the parallel universes, he artfully preserves the ambiguity at the heart of a question posed by the narrator: "Is this world inside the high brick wall? Or outside it?" It's an astonishing achievement.
