The City and Its Uncertain Walls

By: Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel - translator

Narrated by: Brian Nishii

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

Critic reviews

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

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

Regular readers will delight in the Easter eggs nested in an unsettling quest spun from Murakami’s long-patented dream logic

An enveloping magical realist story

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

[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

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

Spellbinding...oddly irresistible

A sublime meditation on time, age and love

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