(Knopf, $30.50)
Haruki Murakami has produced his masterpiece, said Jeremy C. Owens in the San Jose Mercury News. At almost 1,000 pages, 1Q84 nearly perfects the interplay between fantasy and reality that the Japanese author has been experimenting with since the 1970s. Aomame, a fitness trainer who moonlights as an assassin, inadvertently steps into a wormhole that sends her from 1984 Tokyo to a variant world she dubs “1Q84,” a shift she detects when she notices two moons in the sky. Tengo, meanwhile, is an aspiring novelist rewriting a book by a member of a cult. Where Murakami’s previous novels revel in dream worlds, 1Q84 is “about wanting to wake up,” said Laura Miller in Salon.com. This book turns on Aomame and Tengo’s sober love story, making it Murakami’s “warmest” novel yet. His writing can be dry and suffused with cliché, but its simplicity helps him simulate a journey into the subconscious. “Few writers speak the truths of that secret, inner universe more fluently.”
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