When a young man’s girlfriend mysteriously vanishes, he sets his heart on finding the imaginary city where her true self lives. His search will lead him to take a job in a remote library with mysteries of its own.
When he finally makes it to the walled city, a shadowless place of horned beasts and willow trees, he finds his beloved working in a different library – a dream library. But she has no memory of their life together in the other world and, as the lines between reality and fantasy start to blur, he must decide what he’s willing to lose.
A masterpiece... quietly miraculous… The greatest books…are those which enable us to enter their worlds, just as Murakami’s narrator enters his mysterious libraries - Telegraph
No other author mixes domestic, fantastic and esoteric elements into such weirdly bewitching shades. - Financial Times
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
An enveloping magical realist story - i
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
[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
Murakami blends the whimsical and the threatening with the skill of that other pre-eminent Japanese visionary, Hayao Miyazaki - A.K. Blakemore, Guardian
Spellbinding...oddly irresistible - Wall Street Journal
A sublime meditation on time, age and love - Woman and Home
One of his best. It feels at once sweeping and intimate, grand and tender, quiet and charged with feeling - Boston Globe
