The City and Its Uncertain Walls

It’s safe to say that there’s no one like Murakami.

Literary Review

No other author mixes domestic, fantastic and esoteric elements into such weirdly bewitching shades.

Financial Times

Murakami is a master storyteller and he knows how to keep us hooked

Sunday Times

Beguilingly enigmatic...Murakami blends science fiction, gothic novel, noir mystery, horror, and coming-of-age story... 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 Reviews, Starred Review

Regular readers will delight in the Easter eggs nested in an unsettling quest spun from Murakami’s long-patented dream logic

Observer, Best Novels Autumn 2024

A mysterious, magical book that reveals itself like a secret being said. Murakami offers a beguiling look at self and the lengths we go to for love

Hanako Footman, author of MONGREL

An enveloping magical realist story

i

A long, leisurely novel that jumps between here and there, fantasy and reality, and then and now. The result is very Murakamiesque

Herald

A 'cosy' masterpiece with agony between its lines… [The City and Its Uncertain Walls is] quietly miraculous… The greatest books…are those which enable us to enter their worlds, just as Murakami’s narrator enters his mysterious libraries

Telegraph *****

A sublime meditation on time, age and love

Woman and Home

Murakami’s favourite motifs proliferate as the boundaries between the real and unreal, conscious and unconscious, blur

Daily Mail

Murakami…stays true to form with this novel… a speculative fantasy with a faintly creepy undertow

Mail on Sunday

One of his best. It feels at once sweeping and intimate, grand and tender, quiet and charged with feeling

Boston Globe

Spellbinding...oddly irresistible

Wall Street Journal

[Murakami’s] imagination is one of a kind, and his blend of pop culture, postmodernism and Japanese mythology is a wholly unique contribution to literature

Washington Post

Mysterious, illusive… there is something about the way [Murakami] writes that is so captivating

Rumaan Alam

Ghostbustlingly alive. I was moved by [Murakami’s] portrait of impossible loss, how it can carve within us a Stygian underworld to which we are always being summoned. I even interpreted Murakami’s stinting on fictional norms as an attempt to more directly represent the self-exiling quality of melancholic grief

Junot Diaz

As we stare down social and ecological disasters, we need new ways to talk about what is real. Murakami writes most transparently about our contemporary moment toward the end of his latest novel in a reflection on the ‘pandemic of the soul.

Los Angeles Times

Haruki Murakami invented 21st-century fiction

New York Times

More than any author since Kafka, Murakami appreciates the genuine strangeness of our real world

San Francisco Chronicle

Murakami blends the whimsical and the threatening with the skill of that other pre-eminent Japanese visionary, Hayao Miyazaki

A.K. Blakemore, Guardian

A towering achievement

Hot Press Magazine.

Inventive and magical…full of rich detail

Good Housekeeping (Book of the Month)

... Mixes love, mystery and magic. This is the kind of book you think about long after you finish reading Irish Independen

Irish Independent

Wistful, nostalgic, powerful and poignant

UK Press Syndication

A sublime meditation on what it is to be human, our conscious and subconscious worlds, time, age and love

Woman's Weekly

A sideways, thoughtful and sometimes playful journey into how we understand ourselves and who we want to be

SFX

[Murakami’s] principal concern has always been the pain and necessity of learning to be alone… Those concerns are universal. Mr Murakami’s compassionate rendering of them is why millions seek solitude to read his books

Economist