Surrealist fiction

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 A work place novel. A love story. A dream you can’t wake from… Jonathan Abernathy is a loser. Unemployed and behind on his student loan repayments, the only thing Abernathy has in abundance is debt. When a secretive government loan forgiveness programme offers him a job he can literally do in his sleep, Abernathy thinks he’s found his big break. He finds himself entering the dreams of white-collar workers to audit them – flagging their anxieties for removal at night so they'll be more productive in the day. But as the lines between life and work, right and wrong, and even sleep and consciousness blur, Abernathy begins to wonder just how much he might have signed away … Wildly imaginative, laced with black humour and full of close-to-the-bone truths, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is the cult workplace novel that’s like nothing else you've read before. 
When a young man’s girlfriend mysteriously vanishes, he sets his heart on finding the imaginary city where her true self lives. His search will lead him to take a job in a remote library with mysteries of its own. When he finally makes it to the walled city, a shadowless place of horned beasts and willow trees, he finds his beloved working in a different library – a dream library. But she has no memory of their life together in the other world and, as the lines between reality and fantasy start to blur, he must decide what he’s willing to lose. A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a parable for these strange times. 
A young man accompanies his cousin to the hospital to check an unusual hearing complaint and recalls a story of a woman put to sleep by tiny flies crawling inside her ear; a mirror appears out of nowhere and a nightwatchman is unnerved as his reflection tries to take control of him; a couple's relationship is unbalanced after dining exclusively on exquisite crab while on holiday; a man follows instructions on the back of a postcard to apply for a job, but an unknown password stands between him and his mysterious employer. In each one of these stories Murakami sidesteps the real and sprints for the surreal. Everyday events are transcended, leaving the reader dazzled by this master of his craft. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is Murakami's most eclectic collection of stories to date, spanning five years of his writing. An introduction explains the diversity of the author's choice.
A moving, thoughtful story of long-lost love and second chances Growing up in the suburbs in post-war Japan, it seemed to Hajime that everyone but him had brothers and sisters. His sole companion was Shimamoto, also an only child. Together they spent long afternoons listening to her father's record collection. But when his family moved away, the two lost touch. Now Hajime is in his thirties. After a decade of drifting, he has found happiness with his loving wife and two daughters, and success running a jazz bar. Then Shimamoto reappears. She is beautiful, intense, enveloped in mystery. Hajime is catapulted into the past, putting at risk all he has in the present.
There was no past, no future, no words, nothing - just the light and the yellow and the scent of dry leaves in the sun. Japan's internationally celebrated storyteller returns with five stories of healing and hope. Effortlessly beautiful, nostalgic and melancholy, the stories in Dead-End Memories explore the stories of five women who, following sudden and painful events, find solace in the blissful moments in everyday life. The daughter of a restaurant owner experiences a budding romance, accompanied by the ghosts of an elderly couple. After a scandalous near-death experience, an editor gains a new lease of life. A woman seeks refuge in the apartment above her uncle's bar after being betrayed by her fiancé. As Yoshimoto's gentle, effortless prose reminds us, one true miracle can be as simple as having someone to share a meal with, and happiness is always within us if only we take a moment to see it.
The million-copy bestselling series. In the fifth book in the sensational Before the Coffee Gets Cold series translated from Japanese, the mysterious Tokyo café where customers arrive hoping to travel back in time welcomes four new guests:- The father who could not allow his daughter to get married- A woman who couldn't give Valentine's Day chocolates to her loved one- A boy who wants to show his smile to his divorced parents- A wife holding a child with no name . . . They must follow the café's strict rules, however, and come back to the present before their coffee goes cold. Another moving and heartwarming tale from Toshikazu Kawaguchi, in Before We Forget Kindness our new visitors wish to go back into their past to find closure and comfort so they can embark on a beautiful future. Catch up on the rest of the series with Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Tales from the Cafe, Before Your Memory Fades and Before We Say Goodbye.
Read the award-winning, critically acclaimed, multi-million-copy-selling science-fiction phenomenon – now a major Netflix Original Series from the creators of Game of Thrones.  1967: Ye Wenjie witnesses Red Guards beat her father to death during China's Cultural Revolution. This singular event will shape not only the rest of her life but also the future of mankind. Four decades later, Beijing police ask nanotech engineer Wang Miao to infiltrate a secretive cabal of scientists after a spate of inexplicable suicides. Wang's investigation will lead him to a mysterious online game and immerse him in a virtual world ruled by the intractable and unpredictable interaction of its three suns. This is the Three-Body Problem and it is the key to everything: the key to the scientists' deaths, the key to a conspiracy that spans light-years and the key to the extinction-level threat humanity now faces.
The dazzling new high concept murder mystery from the author of the million copy selling, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle Outside the island there is nothing: the world destroyed by a fog that swept the planet, killing anyone it touched. On the island: it is idyllic. 122 villagers and 3 scientists, living in peaceful harmony. The villagers are content to fish, farm and feast, to obey their nightly curfew, to do what they’re told by the scientists. Until, to the horror of the islanders, one of their beloved scientists is found brutally stabbed to death. And they learn the murder has triggered a lowering of the security system around the island, the only thing that was keeping the fog at bay. If the murder isn’t solved within 107 hours, the fog will smother the island – and everyone on it. But the security system has also wiped everyone’s memories of exactly what happened the night before, which means that someone on the island is a murderer – and they don’t even know it…
The new novel from the bestselling author of the beloved classic, Kitchen. I had a premonition of setting out on a journey and getting lost inside a distant tide ... It was the beginning of summer, and I was nineteen years old. Yayoi lives with her perfect, loving family - something 'like you'd see in a Spielberg movie'. But while her parents tell happy stories of her childhood, she is increasingly haunted by the sense that she's forgotten something important about her past. Deciding to take a break, she goes to stay with her mysterious but beloved aunt Yukino, whose strange behaviour includes waking Yayoi at two in the morning to be her drinking companion, watching Friday the 13th repeatedly and throwing away all the things she wants to forget. Living a life without order, Yukino seems to be protecting herself, but beneath this facade Yayoi starts to recover lost memories, and everything she knows about her past threatens to change forever.
The million-copy bestselling series. Toshikazu Kawaguchi's poignant Before We Say Goodbye, translated from Japanese, explores the age-old question: what would you do if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?The regulars at the magical Cafe Funiculi Funicula are well acquainted with its famous legend and extraordinary, secret menu time travel offering. Many patrons have reunited with old flames, made amends with estranged family, and visited loved ones. But the journey is not without risks and there are rules to follow. Travellers must have visited the cafe previously and most importantly, must return to the present in the time it takes for their coffee to go cold. In the tradition of Kawaguchi's sensational 'Before the Coffee Gets Cold' series, readers are be introduced to a new set of visitors:- The husband with something important left to say- The woman who couldn't bid her dog farewell- The woman who couldn't answer a proposal- The daughter who drove her father away .  . .  In the hauntingly beautiful Before We Say Goodbye, Kawaguchi invites us to join his characters as they embark on a journey to revisit one crucial moment in time. Catch up on the rest of the series with Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Tales from the Cafe and Before Your Memory Fades.
What would you change if you could go back in time? In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a cafe which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time. In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the cafe's time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know. But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the cafe, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . . Toshikazu Kawaguchi's beautiful, moving story - translated from Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot - explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?
A mindbending new collection of short stories from the unique, internationally acclaimed author of Norwegian Wood and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. A GUARDIAN AND SUNDAY TIMES 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK The eight masterly stories in this new collection are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator. From nostalgic memories of youth, meditations on music and an ardent love of baseball to dreamlike scenarios, an encounter with a talking monkey and invented jazz albums, together these stories challenge the boundaries between our minds and the exterior world. Occasionally, a narrator who may or may not be Murakami himself is present. Is it memoir or fiction? The reader decides. Philosophical and mysterious, the stories in First Person Singular all touch beautifully on love and solitude, childhood and memory. . . all with a signature Murakami twist.
What would you change if you could go back in time? In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a cafe which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time. In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the cafe's time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know. But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the cafe, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . . Toshikazu Kawaguchi's beautiful, moving story - translated from Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot - explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?
Kafka Tamura runs away from home at fifteen, under the shadow of his father's dark prophesy. The aging Nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his pleasantly simplified life suddenly turned upside down. As their parallel odysseys unravel, cats converse with people; fish tumble from the sky; a ghost-like pimp deploys a Hegel-spouting girl of the night; a forest harbours soldiers apparently un-aged since World War II. There is a savage killing, but the identity of both victim and killer is a riddle - one of many which combine to create an elegant and dreamlike masterpiece.
Sumire is in love with a woman seventeen years her senior. But whereas Miu is glamorous and successful, Sumire is an aspiring writer who dresses in an oversized second-hand coat and heavy boots like a character in a Kerouac novel.  Sumire spends hours on the phone talking to her best friend K about the big questions in life: what is sexual desire, and should she ever tell Miu how she feels for her? Meanwhile K wonders whether he should confess his own unrequited love for Sumire.  Then, a desperate Miu calls from a small Greek island: Sumire has mysteriously vanished... 
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2004 Winner of the Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies . . . Six interlocking lives - one amazing adventure. In a narrative that circles the globe and reaches from the 19th century to a post-apocalyptic future, Cloud Atlas erases the boundaries of time, genre and language to offer an enthralling vision of humanity's will to power, and where it will lead us. *Please note that the end of p39 and p40 are intentionally blank* ISBN: 9780340822784 Categories: Contemporary Fiction  Classic Books & Novels  Science Fiction  Science Fiction  Fantasy  Fantasy Books
The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. In this world, the fates of two people, Tengo and Aomame, are closely intertwined. They are each, in their own way, doing something very dangerous. And in this world, there seems no way to save them both. Something extraordinary is starting.
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. 
A marvelous hybrid of mythology and mystery, A Wild Sheep Chase is the extraordinary literary thriller that launched Haruki Murakami's international reputation. It begins simply enough: A twenty-something advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend, and casually appropriates the image for an insurance company's advertisement. What he doesn't realise is that included in the pastoral scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man in black who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences. Thus begins a surreal and elaborate quest that takes our hero from the urban haunts of Tokyo to the remote and snowy mountains of northern Japan, where he confronts not only the mythological sheep, but the confines of tradition and the demons deep within himself. Quirky and utterly captivating, A Wild Sheep Chase is Murakami at his astounding best.
The epic new novel from the internationally acclaimed and best-selling author of 1Q84. In Killing Commendatore, a thirty-something portrait painter in Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. When he discovers a strange painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances. To close it, he must complete a journey that involves a mysterious ringing bell, a two-foot-high physical manifestation of an Idea, a dapper businessman who lives across the valley, a precocious thirteen-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt during World War II in Vienna, a pit in the woods behind the artist's home, and an underworld haunted by Double Metaphors. A tour de force of love and loneliness, war and art - as well as a loving homage to The Great Gatsby - Killing Commendatore is a stunning work of imagination from one of our greatest writers.
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