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The City and Its Uncertain Walls

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

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

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.

'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

© Haruki Murakami 2024 (P) Penguin Audio 2024

Critics 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
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

User Reviews

Book 4.0
Narration 5.0
Author Haruki Murakami
Narrator Brian Nishii
Duration 17 hours and 26 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781529929584
Format Audiobook
Publisher Random House
Genre Fiction in translation, Magical realism, Metaphysical / philosophical fiction, Narrative theme: Death, grief, loss, Narrative theme: Interior life, Narrative theme: Love and relationships
Availability AU, GB, IE
Rating
4.0 (1 review)
Narration
5.0 (1 review)

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