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Norwegian Wood

Discover Haruki Murakami’s most beloved novel

Haruki Murakami author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Vintage Publishing

Published:17th May '01

Should be back in stock very soon

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Norwegian Wood cover

The haunting, enigmatic love story that turned Murakami into a literary superstar in Japan, and is his bestselling title throughout the world

Toru Watanabe is looking back on the love and passions of his life and trying to make sense of it all. As his first love Naoko sinks deeper into mental despair, he is inexorably pushed to find a new meaning and a new love in order to survive.

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'A masterly novel' New York Times

'Such is the exquisite, gossamer construction of Murakami's writing that everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility' Guardian

Read the haunting love story that turned Murakami into a literary superstar.

When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

'Evocative, entertaining, sexy and funny; but then Murakami is one of the best writers around' Time Out

'Poignant, romantic and hopeless, it beautifully encapsulates the heartbreak and loss of faith' Sunday Times

'This book is undeniably hip, full of student uprisings, free love, booze and 1960s pop, it's also genuinely emotionally engaging, and describes the highs of adolescence as well as the lows' Independent on Sunday

Norwegian Wood is Japan's The Catcher in the Rye * Daily Telegraph *
Everyone who reads Norwegian Wood runs out to buy copies for friends and lovers... Drawing on Fitzgerald, Capote, Chandler and the Japanese tradition, his books are at once disarmingly direct and slyly, charmingly evasive. They are playful and melancholy; full of wrong turns and red herrings, corridors that lead nowhere and - above all - girls who disappear * Guardian *
A masterly novel. . . . Norwegian Wood bears the unmistakable marks of Murakami's hand * The New York Times Book Review *
This book is undeniably hip, full of student uprisings, free love, booze and 1960s pop, it's also genuinely emotionally engaging, and describes the highs of adolescence as well as the lows * Independent on Sunday *
Catches the absorption and giddy rush of adolescent love... It is also, for all the tragic momentum and the apparently kamikaze consciousness of many of its characters, often funny and quirkily observed. Quietly compulsive and finally moving * Times Literary Supplement *
A heart-stoppingly moving story... Murakami is, without a doubt, one of the world's finest novelists * Glasgow Herald *
Evocative, entertaining, sexy and funny; but then Murakami is one of the best writers around * Time Out *
Norwegian Wood . . . not only points to but manifests the author's genius * Chicago Tribune *
An intimate and dark story... A beautifully introspective novel that made me feel all the emotions * Cosmopolitan *
Murakami must already rank among the world's greatest living novelists * Guardian *

ISBN: 9780099448822

Dimensions: 196mm x 128mm x 25mm

Weight: 278g

400 pages