Book Birthday Shout Out is a weekly meme hosted by Bewitched Bookworms created to celebrate authors and the release of their latest novels. For more information, click here.
“Murakami is like a magician who explains what he’s doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers . . . But while anyone can tell a story that resembles a dream, it's the rare artist, like this one, who can make us feel that we are dreaming it ourselves.” —The New York Times Book Review
The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.
A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question.” Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.
As Aomame’s and Tengo’s narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector.
A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell’s—1Q84 is Haruki Murakami’s most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.
- Barnes & Noble
I'm sure I'm not the only one spazzing over this masterpiece! I've only read two novels by Haruki Murakami, but I'm almost sure that I'll always be able to see something beautiful and special about everything he writes. There's nothing like the music in his prose, and his ability to transform the ordinary into an extraordinary dimension. 1Q84 promises to be no less than epic! It's synopsis seems a whirlwind of people, places and things, but I look forward to going on a journey with Aomame and Tengo. I'm sure it'll be so bizarre that no one could predict it's outcome. It's also a staggering 944 pages. Hopefully it won't take me an entire year, God Willing, to read it!
Happy Book Birthday, Haruki Murakami. Thank you for supplying us with masterful imagination candy!
