The wind-up bird chronicle - Haruki Murakami

Enter the surreal and enchanting world of Haruki Murakami.


Toru Okada's cat has disappeared.


His wife is growing more distant every day.


Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has recently
been receiving.


As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's
vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera
and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out. He embarks on
a bizarre journey, guided by a succession of characters, each with a tale to
tell.


'Mesmerising, surreal, this really is the work
of a true original' The Times


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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, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon.

In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Men Without Women, Murakami's distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring his place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

Deeply philosophical and teasingly perplexing, it is impossible to put down
Daily Telegraph

Visionary...a bold and generous book
New York Times

Critics have variously likened him to Raymond Carver, Raymond Chandler, Arthur C. Clarke, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Pynchon - a roster so ill assorted as to suggest Murakami is in fact an original
New York Times

Murakami writes of contemporary Japan, urban alienation and journey's of self-discovery, and in this book he combines recollections of the war with metaphysics, dreams and hallucinations into a powerful and impressionistic work
Independent

Mesmerising, surreal, this really is the work of a true original
The Times