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The economy was booming. People had more money than they knew what to do with. And then the earthquake struck. Komura's wife follows the TV reports from morning to night: images of flames, smoke, buildings turned to rubble, fires everywhere. Pure hell. For the characters in Murakami's latest short-story collection, the Kobe earthquake is an echo from a past they buried long ago. Satsuki has spent 30 years hating one man who destroyed her chances of having children. Did her desire for revenge cause the earthquake? Junpei's estranged parents live in Kobe. Should he contact them? Four-year-old Sala has nightmares that the Earthquake Man is trying to stuff her and everyone else inside a little box. Unappreciated and unpromoted, Katagiri returns home to find a giant frog in his apartment on

It is 1948. Japan is rebuilding her cities after the calamity of World War II, her people putting defeat behind them and looking to the future. The celebrated painter Masuji Ono fills his days attending to his garden, his house repairs, his two grown daughters and his grandson, and his evenings drinking with old associates in quiet Iantern-lit bars. His should be a tranquil retirement. But as his memories continually return to the past - to a life and a career deeply touched by the rise of Japanese militarism - a dark shadow begins to grow over his serenity.

Every marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark. Lisey knew it when she first fell for Scott. And now he`s dead, she knows it for sure. Lisey was the light to Scott Landon`s dark for twenty-five years. As his wife, only she saw the truth behind the public face of the famous author - that he was a haunted man whose bestselling novels were based on a terrifying reality. Now Scott has gone, Lisey wants to lock herself away with her memories. But the fans have other ideas. And when the sinister threats begin, Lisey realises that, just as Scott depended on her strength - her light - to live, so she will have to draw on his darkness to survive.

Part archaeological adventure, part philological mystery and a totally thumping good read! 70 AD. A group of Roman soldiers crossing the Sahara desert is destroyed by a ferocious and mysterious presence hidden in a solitary tower at the extreme borders of the sea of sand. The sole survivor, the Etruscan seer Avile Vipinas, is inexplicably saved by the sound of his silver sistrum. Nineteen centuries later, young American scholar Philip Garrett is investigating his father’s disappearance in the desert 10 years earlier when he discovers the house of Avile Vipinas in the underground ruins of Pompeii, sealed by the earthquake of 79 AD.The ancient seer, before his death, had tried to describe the horrific presence in the Tower of Solitude and to make the first faltering steps to its destru

Kathy, Ruth and Tommy were pupils at Hailsham - an idyllic establishment situated deep in the English countryside. The children there were tenderly sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe they were special, and that their personal welfare was crucial. But for what reason were they really there? It is only years later that Kathy, now aged 31, finally allows herself to yield to the pull of memory and try to make sense of the past. What unfolds is an extraordinarily powerful story in which Kathy, Ruth and Tommy slowly come to realise that it is their seemingly happy childhood that has haunted them ever since, even tainting their adult lives. Part love story, part mystery, "Never Let Me Go" is a uniquely beautiful and troubling novel, charged throughout with a profound emot

This is a modern-day adventure story featuring Paulo's supernatural encounter with angels -- who appear as warrior women and travel through the Mojave desert on their motorbikes. Haunted by a devastating curse, Paulo is instructed by his mysterious spiritual master to embark upon a journey -- to find and speak to his guardian angel in an attempt to confront and overcome his dark past. The Valkyries is a compelling account of this forty day quest into the searing heat of the Mojave Desert, where Paulo and his wife, Chris, encounter the Valkyries -- warrior women who travel the desert on motorcycles, spreading the word of angels. This exotic spiritual odyssey is a rare combination of truth, myth, imagination and inspiration. Ultimately it is a story about being able to forgive our past a

The million-copy bestseller Ex-philosophy teacher Jostein Gaarder & Albert Knos stimulate 15 year old Sophieto ask those fundamental questions which have exercised the imaginations of Children Phiolosophers since the dawn of civilisation.

This is a narrative particle accelerator that zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey and Bob Dylan, unicorn skulls and voracious librarians, John Coltrane and Lord Jim. Science fiction, detective story and post modern manifesto all rolled into one rip-roaring novel, "Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" is the tour de force that expanced Haruki Murakami's international following, tracking one man's descent into the kafkaesque underworld farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy. The result is a wildly inventive fantasy and a meditation on the many uses of the mind.

"Kafka on the Shore" follows the fortunes of two remarkable characters. Kafka Tamura runs away from home at fifteen, under the shadow of his father's dark prophesy. The aging Nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his pleasantly simplified life suddenly turned upside down. Their parallel odysseys are enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerising dramas. Cats converse with people; fish tumble from the sky; a ghostlike pimp deploys a Hegel-spouting girl of the night; a forest harbours soldiers apparently un-aged since WWII. There is a savage killing, but the identity of both victim and killer is a riddle. Murakami's new novel is at once a classic tale of quest, but it is also a bold exploration of mythic and contemporary ta