1Q84 Books 1 and 2

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world there is no doubt about that. But in this world there are two moons in the sky. In this world the fates of two people Tengo and Aomame are closely intertwined. And in this world there seems no way to save them both.|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.|A surreal and fractured dose of storytelling that only Murakami cold write.|A surreal and fractured dose of storytelling that only Murakami cold write.|It’s pure uncut Murakami.|Murakami's magnum opus|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|Read this imaginative masterpiece from the internationally bestselling author of Norwegian Wood The year is 1984. Aomame sits in a taxi on the expressway in Tokyo. Her work is not the kind which can be discussed in public but she is in a hurry to carry out an assignment and with the traffic at a stand-still the driver proposes a solution. She agrees but as a result of her actions starts to feel increasingly detached from the real world. She has been on a top-secret mission and her next job will lead her to encounter the apparently superhuman founder of a religious cult. Meanwhile Tengo wishes to become a writer. He inadvertently becomes involved in a strange affair surrounding a literary prize to which a mysterious seventeen-year-old girl has submitted her remarkable first novel. It seems to be based on her own experiences and moves readers in unusual ways. Can her story really be true? Both Aomame and Tengo notice that the world has grown strange; both realise that they are indispensable to each other. While their stories influence one another at times by accident and at times intentionally the two come closer and closer to intertwining. 'It is a work of maddening brilliance and gripping originality deceptively casual in style but vibrating with wit intellect and ambition' The Times