The City and Its Uncertain Walls : A Novel

Summary: From the bestselling author of Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World comes a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for these peculiar times. "Haruki Murakami invented 21st-century fiction." —The New York Times • "More than any author since Kafka, Murakami appreciates the genuine strangeness of our real world." —San Francisco Chronicle • "Murakami is masterful." —Los Angeles Times"Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change/movement. Isn't this the quintessential core of what stories are all about?” —Haruki Murakami, from the afterword to The City and Its Uncertain WallsThe long-awaited new novel from Haruki Murakami, his first in six years, revisits a Town his readers will remember, a place where a Dream Reader reviews dreams and where our shadows become untethered from our selves. A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for these strange post-pandemic times, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers. A MAJOR PUBLICATION: The City and Its Uncertain Walls will be Murakami’s first novel in six years. Murakami's last six works of fiction were all national best sellers, while his last book, Novelist as a Vocation, was an instant NYT best seller. The City and Its Uncertain Walls was published in Japan in 2023, and was a massive best seller.A CULTURAL PHENOMENON: A perennial favorite for the Nobel Prize, Murakami is "a cultural force unto himself" (AV Club). The New York Times Book Review declared that he "invented 21st-century fiction." Each new novel is greeted with huge excitement, and his fans—"Harukists"—will no doubt be driven to this ambitious book.REVISITING "THE TOWN": The fantastical otherworld that The City takes place in was introduced in one of Murakami's most beloved novels, Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, where he wrote about it briefly, only in a few chapters. Now, Murakami revisits this imaginative city, and expands it and its inhabitants.BACKLIST: We have sold more than 6 million copies of Murakami's books across all formats, and Murakami’s influence continues to sore. We have recently repackaged his paperbacks with striking new covers.ONLINE PRESENCE: Murakami's Facebook fan page has 2.4M fans who avidly follow news about every publication. His books—old and new—are regularly reviewed by book influencers across all social media platforms, and he is the favorite author of celebrities like Emma Watson, Harry Styles, and Joe Jonas.Quotes:★ "Another beguilingly enigmatic tale from Murakami, complete with jazz, coffee, Borgesian twists, the Beatles, and other trademark motifs. . . .Murakami blends science fiction, gothic novel, noir mystery, horror (think Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s film Pulse), and coming-of-age story. . . . [An] elegant fable that deftly weaves ordinary reality—“something you have to choose by yourself, out of several possible alternatives”—with a shadow world that is at once eerie and beautiful. Astonishing, puzzling, and hallucinatory as only Murakami can be, and one of his most satisfying tales." -- Kirkus (starred review)Author Bio: HARUKI MURAKAMI was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and one of the most recent of his many international honors is the Cino Del Duca World Prize, whose previous recipients include Jorge Luis Borges, Ismail Kadare, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Joyce Carol Oates.Author Residence: Tokyo, JapanAuthor Hometown: Kyoto, Japan