Available Formats
The City and Its Uncertain Walls
By (Author) Haruki Murakami
Translated by Philip Gabriel
Vintage Publishing
Harvill Secker
19th November 2024
19th November 2024
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Metaphysical / philosophical fiction
Fiction in translation
Narrative theme: Death, grief, loss
Narrative theme: Love and relationships
Narrative theme: Interior life
Hardback
464
Width 161mm, Height 242mm, Spine 40mm
697g
The breathtaking new novel about the boundaries between worlds and individuals, from the internationally bestselling author of 1Q84. A novel about the porous boundary between the real and shadow worlds. After losing his beloved as a teenager, the narrator finds his way to the Town, a mysterious place where he finds work as a Dream Reader in the library. Back in the real world as an adult he tries to recapture his time in the Town by taking a job as a librarian in a remote location in Fukushima province, where he takes over the job from a ghost. When a boy, M, who visits the library every day, vanishes, the boundaries between spatial and temporal realities, and between individuals, seems to have been breached. A novel about the barriers, imaginary and real, that we put up between and within ourselves.
Its safe to say that theres no one like Murakami.
No other author mixes domestic, fantastic and esoteric elements into such weirdly bewitching shades.
Murakami is a master storyteller and he knows how to keep us hooked
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.