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A Wild Sheep Chase
Haruki Murakami
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Description for A Wild Sheep Chase
Paperback. Features a girl whose ears are so exquisite that, when uncovered, they improve sex a thousand-fold, a runaway friend, a right-wing politico, an ovine-obsessed professor, and a manic-depressive in a sheep outfit. Num Pages: 304 pages. BIC Classification: FA. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 196 x 129 x 20. Weight in Grams: 216.
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 ... Read moreand 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.
'A Wild Sheep Chase has the conventional hull of a thriller - a quest, a mystery, an extraordinary woman, and plenty of elegant duress - but its fantastic superstructure transforms it into something quite different...a science fiction fantasy, a romance, a metaphysical tease, or a dramatisation of philosophical ideas' Independent
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Product Details
Publisher
Vintage Publishing
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 2 to 4 working days
About Haruki Murakami
In 1978, Haruki Murakami was 29 and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers’ award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland ... Read moreand the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami’s unique and addictive fictional universe. Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring Murakami’s place as one of the world’s most acclaimed and well-loved writers. Show Less
Reviews for A Wild Sheep Chase
Wonderfully easy to read and just as wonderfully difficult to make sense of...like the narrator, who slowly accepts the presence in his life of mystery, we slowly recognize the possibility of a new kind of world. Like him, we lean forward and topple headlong into magic
Washington Post
It begins as a detective novel, dips into a screwball ... Read morecomedy, and at its close becomes a tale of possession...A highly accomplished piece of craftsmanship
New Yorker
Mr. Murakami's style and imagination are closer to that of Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Carver and John Irving
New York Times
A Wild Sheep Chase has the conventional hull of a thriller - a quest, a mystery, an extraordinary woman, and plenty of elegant duress - but its fantastic superstructure transforms it into something quite different...a science fiction fantasy, a romance, a metaphysical tease, or a dramatisation of philosophical ideas
Independent
If you consider yourself an intelligent, sensitive common reader but wish to accommodate something a little removed from your experience, and probably your imagination, I dare you to turn your eyes towards Murakami and head off on a wild sheep chase.
Glasgow Herald
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