Literature

A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver's enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 --"Q is for 'question mark.' A world that bears a question." Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.

As Aomame's and Tengo's narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector.

A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell's--1Q84 is Haruki Murakami's most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.

Candace Bushnell created a sensation with her first book, Sex and the City, spawning an HBO series that has become a phenomenon. With her sharp insight and uncensored observations of the mating rituals of the Manhattan elite, Bushnell has become a celebrity in her own right--on television, on the newsstands, and in bookstores across the globe.

In a new collection of stories, 4 Blondes, the romantic intrigues, betrayals, victories, and insecurities of four modern women are told with Bushnell's keen wit and sardonic eye. A beautiful B-list model in "Nice N'Easy" attaches herself yearly to the man with the largest summer house in the Hamptons, but she soon realizes that snagging a rich man and living in a fancy beach house won't necessarily bring her happiness. In "Highlights (for Adults)," a high-powered magazine columnist doesn't feel that she needs a man; an examination of her deteriorating marriage shows that her literary journalist husband could never live up to her sexual or emotional expectations. Too many expectations overwhelm Princess Cecilia in "Platinum"; her marriage to "the world's most eligible bachelor" leads to a descent into paranoia that she chronicles in her journal. And in "Single Process," an aging "It girl" worries that she is getting too old to meet a local eligible bachelor, so she travels to London in search of a husband, where she makes pithy observations about the differences between British and American men.

Once again, Bushnell returns to the land of the pretty and the powerful, breaking down bedroom doors with her wry humor and frank portrayals of love and lust among the "It people."

Margaret Drabble's novels have illuminated the past fifty years, especially the changing lives of women, like no others. Yet her short fiction has its own unique brilliance. Her penetrating evocations of character and place, her wide-ranging curiosity, her sense of irony--all are on display here, in stories that explore marriage, female friendships, the English tourist abroad, love affairs with houses, peace demonstrations, gin and tonics, cultural TV programs, in stories that are perceptive, sharp, and funny. With an introduction by the Spanish academic Jose Fernandez that places the stories in the context of her life and her novels, this collection is a wonderful recapitulation of a masterly career.