In this collection of 25 short stories, Haruki Murakami draws the reader into his wondrously addictive literary world: a fabulist land filled with illogical acts, inexplicable disappearances, and talking animals. Murakami is a master of magic-realism, but unlike his Latin-American predecessors, his stories are not lush and verdant, but rather are a...more
Philip is in love with Alice. As the novel opens, he is beginning to lose her. Not to another man, as he fears, but to, literally, nothing. Alice is a physicist, and a team at the University where both she and Philip work has created a hole, a vacuum, a doorway of nothingness inside the laboratory. They call it "Lack." Alice becomes obsessed with L...more
Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow.This improbable story of Christopher’s quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neigh...more
A tragic, spiritual portrait of a perfect English butler and his reaction to his fading insular world in post-war England. A wonderful, wonderful book.
Birmingham, England, c. 1973: industrial strikes, bad pop music, corrosive class warfare, adolescent angst, IRA bombings. Four friends: a class clown who stoops very low for a laugh; a confused artist enthralled by guitar rock; an earnest radical with socialist leanings; and a quiet dreamer obsessed with poetry, God, and the prettiest girl in schoo...more
The tragic death of their best friend has a profound influence on the passionate relationship between Toru, a serious young college student in Tokyo, and Naoko, an introspective, beauty, as Toru finds himself drawn to an independent, sexually liberated young woman.
On the 2d of December 1795, I took my departure from the hospitable mansion of Dr. Laidley. I was fortunately provided with a Negro servant, who spoke both the English and Mandingo tongues. His name was Johnson. He was a native of this part of Africa; and having in his youth been convoyed to Jamaica as a slave, he had been made free, and taken to E...more