South of the Border, West of the Sun

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, First Person Singular and The City and Its Uncertain Walls 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.

"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