City and Its Uncertain Walls

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.

"The spectacular dreamlike library at the center of this book is the kind of rare creation that explains why Murakami is a perennial favorite for oddsmakers trying to predict the Nobel Prize in literature." -- The Seattle 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.

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.