Audition

'The prose in these passages is elegiac and affecting, but it has the sharp, visceral feel of the butcher's knife or surgeons scalpel ...a highly compulsive, one-sitting read, and Audition should add to the Renaissance Man's growing fanbase in the English speaking world' Irvine Welsh, Guardian 'Murakami has gained a reputation as a diagnostician of Japanese culture in the Bret Easton Ellis/Chuck Palahniuk mode ... for all his gory details, and his insistence that modern life is just one more movie, Murakami remains a romantic. Trauma and nostalgia may defeat each other, but there's always hope in the form of the next generation' Telegraph PRAISE FOR PIERCING 'There are echoes here of Edgar Allan Poe and Dostoevsky - Murakami shares their fascination with the darkest layer of the soul, and the appalling isolation of the criminal. Creepy and gripping' The Times 'The fame, or even notoriety, of Ryu Murakami lies in his ability to write tightly plotted, well-written tales of violence, seedy sex and horror combined with a vivid sense of the neon-slashed but oppressive atmosphere of the Tokyo street, all underpinned with a fashionable nihilism' Sunday Telegraph