A Wild Sheep Chase

Key Features

• Murakami's magnum opus, the trilogy 1Q84, was published by Harvill Secker in 2011 to rapturous reviews and his best-ever hardback sales: both volumes were Sunday Times bestsellers and combined hardback sales are nearly at 180,000 copies
• Murakami's entire backlist will be rejacketed in a new iconic, witty and collectable series style to coincide with the publication of 1Q84 in Vintage
• Murakami is an international phenomenon: beloved in his native Japan, he is a bestseller the world over - his books are published in 45 territories, in 42 languages
• A Wild Sheep Chase was the first novel by Murakami to be published outside Japan

About the Book: A Wild Sheep Chase

Leave reality behind and enter Murakami's fictional universe where nothing is ever as it seems

His life was like his recurring nightmare: a train to nowhere. But an ordinary life has a way of taking an extraordinary turn. Add 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, implicate them in a hunt for a sheep, that may or may not be running the world, and the upshot is another singular masterpiece from Japan's finest novelist.

About the Author: Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. He is the author of many novels as well as short stories and non-fiction. His works include Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, After Dark and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. His work has been translated into more than forty languages, and the most recent of his many international honours is the Jerusalem Prize, whose previous recipients include J.M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, and V.S. Naipaul.

Reviews

'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 comedy, and at its close becomes a tale of possession ... A highly accomplished piece of craftsmanship' - L 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