The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.
A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver's enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 -"Q is for 'question mark.' A world that bears a question." Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghost-writing project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unravelled.
A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell's-1Q84 is Haruki Murakami's most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.
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[THE TAXI'S RADIO was tuned to a Classical FM broadcast]***
(@vintagebooks, 18 October 2011, first published 29 May 2009, 820 pages, ebook, bought from @AmazonKindle)
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I am left speechless. This book stunned me. I borrowed the audiobook from my library ages ago but didn't have enough time to listen to the whole thing. I loved it so bought the kindle book. This is one of the most incredible books I've ever read. It's a hard book to define. It's set in a parallel world that is almost identical to the 'real' world except it has two moons in the sky, one pale and sick. It's a story about two people who fell in love as children and haven't seen each other for decades. It's sort of dystopian fiction, I guess. It's a story about a woman who's an assassin and is tasked with taking out the leader of a cult who sexually abuses very young girls. It's the story of a writer tasked with ghost writing a fantasy novella by a seventeen-year-old-girl who escaped the cult. And there are the mysterious Little People of course who seem to be controlling everything. Sometimes I had no idea what was happening in the book but I got such pleasure from the experience of reading it this didn't bother me. 1Q84 Book One And Two ends on a sort of cliff-hanger. I can't wait to read Book Three because I have so many questions.
