National bestseller. The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo. A young woman named Aomame follows the mysterious suggestion of a taxi driver and begins to notice confusing discrepancies in the world around her.

She realizes that she has entered a parallel existence that she calls 1Q84 – "Q stands for question mark. A world that carries a question." Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspicious ghostwriting project. He becomes so engrossed in the work and its unusual author that his previously quiet life soon spirals out of control.

As Aomame's and Tengo's narratives intersect over the course of this single year, we learn of the deep and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious sect that triggered a shootout with the Metropolitan Police; a reclusive, wealthy widow who runs a shelter for abused women; a grotesquely ugly private detective; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and an oddly intrusive television license fee collector.

A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia that rivals George Orwell's – 1Q84 is Haruki Murakami's most ambitious work to date: an instant bestseller in his native Japan and a monumental work of imagination from one of our most esteemed contemporary writers.

Haruki Murakami was born in 1949 in Kyoto and now lives near Tokyo. His works have been translated into more than fifty languages, and his most recent international accolade is the Jerusalem Prize.