EARLY BIRD RELEASE EVENT

Get ready for the highly anticipated new novel from Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, set to be published on 19 November!

To celebrate, Kinokuniya Sydney will open its doors at 8am, giving you the chance to be among the first in the world to snag a copy! PLUS receive a themed cookie and exclusive pin with your book purchase*. These are in limited supply and only available in-store to the first 100 customers.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls revisits a Town Murakami readers will remember, a place where a Dream Reader reviews dreams and where our shadows become untethered from our selves.

A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for these strange post-pandemic times, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers.

REGISTER to attend our early bird event and go into the draw to WIN a super rare lenticular proof - these were only made for proof copies and are not available for purchase.

To be eligible for the draw, the following conditions must be met:

1. Click on 'Register' and fill out your details.

2. Answer the following question: "Why do you want to be one of the first to read Murakami's fantastic new novel?".

3. Be here on 19 November, between 8am - 10am for the early bird release and have your name checked off by staff.

Registrations close 5pm, 18 November 2024.

Our favourite answer will be awarded the exclusive lenticular proof. The winner will be contacted by 20 November. Pick up only available.

WALK INTO THE WORLD OF THE WALLED CITY

Don’t forget to check out the Murakami installation in our Wedge Gallery. Interact with the life size cover of The City and Its Uncertain Walls. Write your dreams on the provided egg cards and place them on the ‘shelf’ with the provided pins.

Thank you to the team at Penguin Books for setting up this egg-cellent display! Tag us @kinokuniya_sydney and @penguinbooksaus in your photos!

ABOUT THE BOOK:

STEP INTO THE CITY

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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers’ award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami’s unique and addictive fictional universe.

Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring Murakami’s place as one of the world’s most acclaimed and well-loved writers.