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The breathtaking new novel about the boundaries between worlds and individuals, from the internationally bestselling author of 1Q84.
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.
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The breathtaking new novel about the boundaries between worlds and individuals, from the internationally bestselling author of 1Q84.
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.
The conceit of this novel is that there exists a fantastical City complete with bridge, clocktower with a handless clock, unicorny beasts and an impermeable wall that seals it off from reality. Somehow, however, the hesitant, querulous Haruki Murakami first-person protagonist breaches that wall and takes up the position of Dream Reader in the City’s library. If this set-up sounds familiar, it’s because it is: Murakami first published a novella, The City, and Its Uncertain Walls (note the comma) in a Japanese literary magazine in 1980, when he was 31 and running his Tokyo jazz bar. The conceit then found its way into his novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), in which it provided one half of the setting – the end of the world.
Forty years after writing the initial novella, in the year 2020 at age 71, Murakami returned to the story: ‘For so long this work had felt like a small fish bone caught in my throat, something that bothered me.’ Throughout the Covid times he reworked the book, easing that fish bone out. The City is, in a way, the idea of fiction, and Murakami’s question is: how is it that we go to fictional places and (more weirdly) exist there?
It begins with a love story between two teenagers, the story of the City being one which they cook up together. The girl escapes into that fictional city, the only place in which, she says, she is real. From that point, alternate chapters present bifurcating versions of the first-person narrator who, in the odd-numbered chapters mourns her disappearance for decades, and in the even-numbered ones, in the City, tries to approach her. From this leaping-off point, we move deeper and deeper into Murakami territory, cosy and uncanny as ever.
Embark on a journey across Japan through heartfelt healing fiction books from Penguin.
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We've run the reports and crunched the numbers. Here are our 100 bestselling books for 2024!
Haruki 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.