{ "item_title" : "The City and Its Uncertain Walls", "item_author" : [" Haruki Murakami", "Philip Gabriel "], "item_description" : "NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - A REAL SIMPLE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 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 We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life. Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world - a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves. Listening to his own dreams and premonitions, the man leaves his life in Tokyo behind and ventures to a small mountain town, where he becomes the head librarian, only to learn the mysterious circumstances surrounding the gentleman who had the job before him. As the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he meets a strange young boy who helps him to see what he's been missing all along. The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a 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", "item_img_path" : "https://covers3.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/59/380/197/0593801970_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "35.00", "online_price" : "29.40", "our_price" : "29.40", "club_price" : "29.40", "savings_pct" : "16", "savings_amt" : "5.60", "club_savings_pct" : "16", "club_savings_amt" : "5.60", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "35.00" } }

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Every new Haruki Murakami book is an event, but The City and Its Uncertain Walls has a special importance for longtime readers of the Japanese master. This weighty tome is not just his first novel in six years, but also a return to one of his earliest works: 1985’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. In the book’s afterword, Murakami relates how he reworked the ideas of that early book, reflecting on 40 years of writing life in the process. Without giving too much of this glorious novel away, what emerges from those four decades of thought is a striking, moving meditation on the price of isolation, the nourishment of stories and how the most important things in our lives reach us in slow, unexpected ways. 

The unnamed narrator of The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a man caught between reality and an alternate world dominated by a strange Town surrounded by an impenetrable wall. When we meet this narrator, he's reminiscing about both a teenage romance with an odd ending and the Town itself, which he once visited to work in a dark library as a Dream Reader. With the love story from his youth and his time in the Town dominating his mind, he sets out to change his life and find fulfillment working in a new, more conventional library. 

Many things about Murakami's work are striking, but what stands out most when you dive into this book is his unmatched narrative patience. He does not rely on breakneck pacing to drive you from page to page. Instead, he moves the story forward steadily, with a confidence and wit that keeps you longing to read on. In his trademark assured, graceful prose, Murakami has produced a work of tremendous ambition that on a sentence-by-sentence level feels like sitting down with a friend to hear them tell a very strange story. It's another masterwork from one of our finest living novelists, and a must-read for Murakami devotees.