Killing Commendatore

A Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Financial Times, Library Journal, LitHub, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year “[Murakami] is as masterful as ever at building an intricate narrative and keeping his audience in suspense. Killing Commendatore is both a testament to the transformational power of art and a cautionary tale on the dangers of exploration.” — Houston Chronicle “A spellbinding parable of art, history, and human loneliness.” — O, The Oprah Magazine “Expansive and intricate . . . touches on many of the themes familiar in Mr. Murakami’s novels: the mystery of romantic love, the weight of history, the transcendence of art, the search for elusive things just outside our grasp.” — The New York Times “Eccentric and intriguing, Killing Commendatore is the product of a singular imagination. . . . Murakami is a wiz at melding the mundane with the surreal. . . . He has a way of imbuing the supernatural with uncommon urgency. His placid narrative voice belies the utter strangeness of his plot. . . . The worldview of Murakami’s novels is consistent, and it’s invigorating. In this book and many that came before it, he urges us to embrace the unusual, accept the unpredictable.” — San Francisco Chronicle “Beguiling. . . . Murakami is brilliant at folding the humdrum alongside the supernatural; finding the magic that’s nested in life’s quotidian details. . . . His prose is warm, conversational and studded with quiet profundities. He’s eminently good company; that most precious of qualities that we look for in an author. We trust him to get us entertainingly lost, just as we trust that he’ll eventually get us home.” — The Guardian “Exhilarating. . . . Only in the calm madness of his magical realism can Murakami truly capture one of his obsessions, the usually ineffable yearning that drives a person to make art.” — The Washington Post “Another intriguing, time-challenging tome you can’t wait to finish . . . while simultaneously wishing you might never reach its conclusion, dreading the end of another indescribable Murakami odyssey.” — The Christian Science Monitor “Some novelists hold a mirror up to the world and some, like Haruki Murakami, use the mirror as a portal to a universe hidden beyond it. . . . What can't be denied is Mr. Murakami's irresistible storytelling ability. He builds his self-contained world deliberately and faithfully, developing intrigue and suspense and even taking care to give each chapter a cliffhanger ending as in an old-fashioned serialized novel.” — The Wall Street Journal “No other author mixes domestic, fantastic and esoteric elements into such weirdly bewitching shades. . . . Just as he straddles barriers dividing high art from mass entertainment, so he suspends borders between east and west.” — Financial Times “Wild; thrilling. . . . Murakami is a master storyteller and he knows how to keep us hooked.” — The Sunday Times (London) “[ Killing Commendatore] marks the return of a master.” — Esquire “More of Murakami’s magical mist, but its size, beauty, and concerns with lust and war bring us back to the vividness and scale of his 1997 epic, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.’’ — The Boston Globe “No ordinary trip; get ready for a wild ride.” — Entertainment Weekly “A perfect balance of tradition and individual talent. . . . Murakami dancing along ‘the inky blackness of the Path of Metaphor’ is like Fred Astaire dancing across a floor, then up the walls and onto the ceiling.” — The Spectator