The City and Its Uncertain Walls: A Novel

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A REAL SIMPLE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the 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 our 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

When a young man’s girlfriend mysteriously vanishes, he is heartbroken – and determined to find the imaginary town where he suspects she has taken up residence. Thus begins a lifelong search that takes the man into middle age, to a job in a remote library with mysteries of its own, and on a journey between the real world and this otherworld: a shadowless city where unicorns roam and willow trees grow.

There he finds his beloved working in a different library – a dream library. But she has no memory of their life together and, as the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he must decide what he is 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– and singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers.

"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