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1Q84 Sampler
1Q84 Sampler
Aug 1, 2025 8:50 PM

Author:Haruki Murakami

1Q84 Sampler

A FREE SAMPLER OF HARUKI MURAKAMI'S NEW MASTERPIECE

This sampler contains the first two chapters of Haruki Murakami's magnum opus, 1Q84, introducing the reader to the hero and heroine of the story, Tengo and Aomame.

The full ebook of Books One and Two will be available in one volume on 18th October 2011, followed by the ebook of Book Three on 25th October.

The year is 1984. Aomame sits in a taxi on the expressway in Tokyo.

Her work is not the kind which can be discussed in public but she is in a hurry to carry out an assignment and, with the traffic at a stand-still, the driver proposes a solution. She agrees, but as a result of her actions starts to feel increasingly detached from the real world. She has been on a top-secret mission, and her next job will lead her to encounter the apparently superhuman founder of a religious cult.

Meanwhile, Tengo is leading a nondescript life but wishes to become a writer. He inadvertently becomes involved in a strange affair surrounding a literary prize to which a mysterious seventeen-year-old girl has submitted her remarkable first novel. It seems to be based on her own experiences and moves readers in unusual ways. Can her story really be true?

Both Aomame and Tengo notice that the world has grown strange; both realise that they are indispensable to each other. While their stories influence one another, at times by accident and at times intentionally, the two come closer and closer to intertwining.

Reviews

Critics have variously likened him to Raymond Carver, Raymond Chandler, Arthur C. Clarke, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Pynchon - a roster so ill assorted as to suggest Murakami is in fact an original

—— New York Times

[1Q84] may become a mandatory read for anyone trying to get to grips with contemporary Japanese culture... [It is Murakami's] magnum opus

—— Japan Times

The cultish Murakami sold 1m copies of this novel in a month when it was published in Japan. Confusingly it is being sold as two separate volumes here, but that won't lessen the demand for this fantastic riff on Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

—— Sunday Times

The Jane Austen of the 20th century

—— Lynne Truss

Stella is stellar

—— Sunday Herald

Stella Gibbons’s gift is very special

—— Daily Express

A beautiful, atmospheric novel sustained by Murakami's flair for philosophical mediation at its most human

—— Irish Times

A wise and beautiful book.

—— The New York Times Book Review

A probing meditation on human fragility, the grip of obsession, and the impenetrable, erotically charged enigma that is the other.

—— The New York Times

Brilliant. . . . A mesmerizing new example of Murakami's deeply original fiction.

—— The Baltimore Sun

Lovely, deceptively simple. . . . A novel of existential romance.

—— San Francisco Chronicle

His most deeply moving novel.

—— The Boston Globe

Mesmerizing. . . . This is a harrowing, a disturbing, a hauntingly brilliant tale.

—— The Baltimore Sun

A fine, almost delicate book about what is unfathomable about us.

—— The Philadelphia Inquirer

Portrayed in a fluid language that veers from the vernacular . . . to the surprisingly poetic.

—— San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
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