South of the Border, West of the Sun

A story of love in a cool climate, intensely romantic and weepily beautiful…it is startlingly different: a true original * Guardian *Casablanca remade Japanese style…It is dream-like writing, laden with scenes which have the radiance of a poem * The Times *This wise and beautiful book is full of hidden truths * New York Times *This book aches…an eloquent treatise on the vertiginous, irrational powers of love and desire * Independent on Sunday *Impressively written and structured… Above all, the novel is memorable for its unflinchingly extreme treatment of romantic love * Times Literary Supplement *Discover what a fine writer Murakami is with this engrossing examination of a male mid-life crisis… He enthrallingly teases out the risks, culminating in a headily sensual finale * Time Out *A beautiful, atmospheric novel sustained by Murakami’s flair for philosophical mediation at its most human * Irish Times *A wise and beautiful book. * The New York Times Book Review *A probing meditation on human fragility, the grip of obsession, and the impenetrable, erotically charged enigma that is the other. * The New York Times *Brilliant… . A mesmerizing new example of Murakami’s deeply original fiction. * The Baltimore Sun *

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, 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.