Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
Author: Matthew Strecher
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 97
Release: 2002-01-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0826452396

This is an excellent guide to Haruki Murakami's extraordinary novel. It features a biography of the author (including an interview), a full-length analysis of the novel, and a great deal more. If you're studying this novel, reading it for your book club, or if you simply want to know more about it, you'll find this guide informative and helpful. This is part of a new series of guides to contemporary novels. The aim of the series is to give readers accessible and informative introductions to some of the most popular, most acclaimed and most influential novels of recent years - from ‘The Remains of the Day' to ‘White Teeth'. A team of contemporary fiction scholars from both sides of the Atlantic has been assembled to provide a thorough and readable analysis of each of the novels in question.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 625
Release: 2010-08-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 030776270X

A "dreamlike and compelling” tour de force (Chicago Tribune)—an astonishingly imaginative detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets from Japan’s forgotten campaign in Manchuria during World War II. Now with a new introduction by the author. In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels.

A Match Made in Lipa

A Match Made in Lipa
Author: Carla de Guzman
Publisher: Carina Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2022-03-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0369720164

Childhood friends reconnect as grown-up rivals—and maybe something more—in this witty Filipino romance from Carla de Guzman. What’s written in the stars isn’t always the whole story… Chocolate maker and shop owner Kira Luz isn’t looking for love, but if fate leads her that way, so be it. When she randomly runs into her childhood crush, Santi, on vacation, it feels like the stars are trying to tell her something. Memories of their time growing up in Lipa—not to mention the steamy kiss they share when they reconnect—get her heart pounding. But she has to go back to Lipa while he’s headed for Manila, and long distance is kind of an issue. Until he moves back home…and distance becomes the least of their problems. Estranged hotel heir Anton "Santi" Santillan is left adrift when his grandfather abruptly cuts him out of the family business. But he finds his footing again running a small niche hotel back in Lipa. The downside of living in his old hometown: it’s no Manila, that’s for sure. The upside: seeing Kira again. Kira, who loves food as much as he does. Kira, who loves kissing as much as he does. Kira, whose family owns the property—including her shop—his grandfather wants him to buy out from underneath them. Mixing love and chocolate and family just might get messy. And sometimes messy is exactly what fate had in mind. The Laneways Book 1: Sweet on You Book 2: A Match Made in Lipa

Killing Commendatore

Killing Commendatore
Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 752
Release: 2018-10-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0525520058

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A tour de force of love and loneliness, war and art—from one of our greatest writers. • “Exhilarating ... magical.” —The Washington Post When a thirty-something portrait painter is abandoned by his wife, he secludes himself in the mountain home of a world famous artist. One day, the young painter hears a noise from the attic, and upon investigation, he discovers a previously unseen painting. By unearthing this hidden work of art, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances; and to close it, he must undertake a perilous journey into a netherworld that only Haruki Murakami could conjure.

A Wild Sheep Chase

A Wild Sheep Chase
Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2010-09-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307762726

A New York Times bestselling author—and “a mythmaker for the millennium, a wiseacre wiseman” (New York Times Book Review)—delivers a surreal and elaborate quest that takes readers from Tokyo to the remote mountains of northern Japan, where the unnamed protagonist has a surprising confrontation with his demons. An advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend and casually appropriates the image for an advertisement. What he doesn’t realize is that included in the scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences.

The Elephant Vanishes

The Elephant Vanishes
Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2010-08-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307762734

In the tales that make up The Elephant Vanishes, the imaginative genius that has made Haruki Murakami an international superstar is on full display. In these stories, a man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald’s in the middle of the night; and a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who burrows up through her backyard. By turns haunting and hilarious, in The Elephant Vanishes Murakami crosses the border between separate realities—and comes back bearing remarkable treasures. Includes the story "Barn Burning," which is the basis for the major motion picture Burning.

Two novels

Two novels
Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher:
Total Pages: 695
Release: 2006
Genre:
ISBN: 9780099507079

Two of Murakami's early novels are brought together. Dark, dry and downright weird, 'A Wild Sheep Chase' is the story of a man, a girl, her ears and a very special sheep. 'Dance Dance Dance' is part murder-mystery, part metaphysical speculation.

Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile

Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile
Author: Alice Jolly
Publisher: Unbound Publishing
Total Pages: 592
Release: 2018-06-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1783525509

SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2019 Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2019 2019 Walter Scott Prize Academy recommendation If you tell a story oft enough So it become true As the nineteenth century draws towards a close, Mary Ann Sate, an elderly maidservant, sets out to write her truth. She writes of the Valleys that she loves, of the poisonous rivalry between her employer's two sons and of a terrible choice which tore her world apart. Her haunting and poignant story brings to life a period of strife and rapid social change, and evokes the struggles of those who lived in poverty and have been forgotten by history. In this fictional found memoir, novelist Alice Jolly uses the astonishing voice of Mary Ann to recreate history as seen from a woman's perspective and to give joyful, poetic voice to the silenced women of the past.

1Q84

1Q84
Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Bond Street Books
Total Pages: 1342
Release: 2011-10-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0385669445

The long-awaited magnum opus from Haruki Murakami, in which this revered and bestselling author gives us his hypnotically addictive, mind-bending ode to George Orwell's 1984. The year is 1984. Aomame is riding in a taxi on the expressway, in a hurry to carry out an assignment. Her work is not the kind that can be discussed in public. When they get tied up in traffic, the taxi driver suggests a bizarre 'proposal' to her. Having no other choice she agrees, but as a result of her actions she starts to feel as though she is gradually becoming detached from the real world. She has been on a top secret mission, and her next job leads her to encounter the superhuman founder of a religious cult. Meanwhile, Tengo is leading a nondescript life but wishes to become a writer. He inadvertently becomes involved in a strange disturbance that develops over a literary prize. While Aomame and Tengo impact on each other in various ways, at times by accident and at times intentionally, they come closer and closer to meeting. Eventually the two of them notice that they are indispensable to each other. Is it possible for them to ever meet in the real world?

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2010-11-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307777693

Hyperkinetic and relentlessly inventive, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is Haruki Murakami’s deep dive into the very nature of consciousness. Across two parallel narratives, Murakami draws readers into a mind-bending universe in which Lauren Bacall, Bob Dylan, a split-brained data processor, a deranged scientist, his shockingly undemure granddaughter, and various thugs, librarians, and subterranean monsters collide to dazzling effect. What emerges is a novel that is at once hilariously funny and a deeply serious meditation on the nature and uses of the mind.