Birthday Stories

The perfect year-round present * Time Out *Brilliant…Murakami introduces all these stories with grace and lightness of touch * Sunday Herald *A memorable collection. Voices and settings as diverse as the authors, but they are all concerned with the arbitrary yet immensely significant way in which we mark the passing of our lives * Observer *The quality of storytelling is exemplary… There’s darkness enough here for the hardiest of cynics, but enough heart to charm * Word *

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.