Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
About this audiobook
Brought to you by Penguin.
Murakami's surreal, mind-bending masterpiece: a sci-fi pastiche and a Utopian fantasy novel ingeniously woven together.
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, post-modern manifesto. All this rolled into one rip-roaring novel, End of the World and Hard-boiled Wonderland is the tour de force that expanded Haruki Murakami’s international following.
Tracking one man's descent into the Kafkaesque underworld of contemporary Tokyo, Murakami unites East and West, tragedy and farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy.
'Here is abundant imagination at play.' Sunday Times
‘A remarkable writer...he captures the common ache of contemporary heart and head’ Jay McInerney
‘His fantasies, with their easy reference to western pulp fiction and music, retain a beauty of the mind’ Guardian
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR
© Haruki Murakami 2001 (P) Penguin Audio 2025
About the author
In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon.
In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Men Without Women, Murakami's distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring his place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers.
