1Q84

Murakami’s magnum opus * Japan Times *1Q84 has a range and sophistication that surpasses anything else in his oeuvre. It is his most achieved novel; an epic in which form and content are neatly aligned… So like Murakami himself, I’ll borrow from Orwell: 1Q84 is quite simply doubleplusgood * Independent on Sunday *1Q84 reads like a cross between Stieg Larsson and Roberto Bolano… In its bones, this novel is a thriller * Daily Telegraph *Eerie, suspenseful and packed full of gorgeous ordinary details and provocative extraordinary events, Murakami takes weighty themes and delivers a compulsive tale that is funny, fresh and intensely surreal. Unmissable. * Marie Claire *It is a work of maddening brilliance and gripping originality, deceptively casual in style, but vibrating with wit, intellect and ambition * The Times *Which other author can remind you simultaneously of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and JK Rowling, not merely within the same chapter but on the same page? Viewed through the “post-modern” lens, his exemplary blend of a light touch and weighty themes, of high literature and popular entertainment, ticks every box. Posh and pop, sublimity and superficiality, history and fantasy, trash and transcendence: they switch positions and then fuse * Independent *A postmodernist mélange of fantasy worlds, dystopias, alternate realities and genre pastiches, all overlaid on an unsuspecting contemporary Japan. They are the sort of fiction that usually attracts a cult following, but Mr Murakami’s cult spreads across the globe * Wall Street Journal *A surreal twist on the formula of David Nicholl’s One Day; fate preventing two soulmates from getting together from getting together for decades… Stieg Larsson enthusiasts may enjoy the novel too as Aomame could be Lisbeth Salader’s Japanese cousin… What makes Murakami cool as well as popular is has metaphysical mischievousness, his playing around with the idea of alternate realities… Every time you open 1Q84, you get the sensation of falling down the rabbit hole, into a unique and addictive world * Sunday Express *The novel of the year… such are Murakami’s gifts, both in terms of his imagination and his skills as a writer, that the near-magical world he conjures seems real and tangible * Word *His default setting as a writer lies in documenting a muted alienation - Kafka with an iPod - and solace, in his books, tends to be found in the sudden human connection of sex and longing, but mostly his characters, like his readers, are left to figure things out on their own with shifting and partial information to go on * Observer *

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was 29 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 and were translated into many languages.

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.