(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.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
Why more and more adults are reaching for soft toysUnder The Radar Does the popularity of the Squishmallow show Gen Z are 'scared to grow up'?
-
Magazine solutions - December 27, 2024 / January 3, 2025Puzzles and Quizzes Issue - December 27, 2024 / January 3, 2025
-
Magazine printables - December 27, 2024 / January 3, 2025Puzzles and Quizzes Issue - December 27, 2024 / January 3, 2025
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”