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The
2003 Award
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Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami
Nominated by:
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Publisher of Nominated Edition: A.A. Knopf ISBN 0375411690 |
| the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors. |
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ABOUT
THE BOOK
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| The narrator is a teacher whose only close friend is Sumire, an aspiring young novelist. Sumire is suddenly smitten with a sophisticated businesswoman and accompanies her to Europe, and ultimately to an island off the coast of Greece, where she disappears without a trace, leaving only lineaments of her fate: computer accounts of bizarre events and stories within stories. The teacher, summoned to assist in the search for her, experiences his own ominous, haunting visions, which lead him nowhere but home to Japan - and there, under the expanse of deep space and the still-orbiting Sputnik, he finally achieves a true understanding of his beloved. A love story, a missing-person story, a detective story - all enveloped in a philosophical mystery - and finally, a profound meditation on human longing and the loneliness of the human condition. |
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
| Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and lives outside Tokyo. He is the author of six previous novels translated into English: A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Dance, Dance, Dance, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (shortlisted for the 1999 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), South of the Border, West of the Sun and Norwegian Wood. He has also written a collection of short stories, The Elephant Vanishes and a non-fiction work, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. |
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