Norwegian Wood

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

The haunting love story that turned Murakami into a literary superstar.

When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

'Evocative, entertaining, sexy and funny; but then Murakami is one of the best writers around' Time Out

'Such is the exquisite, gossamer construction of Murakami's writing that everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility' Guardian

'This book is undeniably hip, full of student uprisings, free love, booze and 1960s pop, it's also genuinely emotionally engaging, and describes the highs of adolescence as well as the lows' Independent on Sunday

© Haruki Murakami 1987 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Critics Review

Norwegian Wood is Japan's The Catcher in the Rye
Daily Telegraph
Everyone who reads Norwegian Wood runs out to buy copies for friends and lovers... Drawing on Fitzgerald, Capote, Chandler and the Japanese tradition, his books are at once disarmingly direct and slyly, charmingly evasive. They are playful and melancholy; full of wrong turns and red herrings, corridors that lead nowhere and - above all - girls who disappear
Guardian
A masterly novel. . . . Norwegian Wood bears the unmistakable marks of Murakami's hand
The New York Times Book Review
This book is undeniably hip, full of student uprisings, free love, booze and 1960s pop, it's also genuinely emotionally engaging, and describes the highs of adolescence as well as the lows
Independent on Sunday
Catches the absorption and giddy rush of adolescent love... It is also, for all the tragic momentum and the apparently kamikaze consciousness of many of its characters, often funny and quirkily observed. Quietly compulsive and finally moving
Times Literary Supplement
A heart-stoppingly moving story... Murakami is, without a doubt, one of the world's finest novelists
Glasgow Herald
Evocative, entertaining, sexy and funny; but then Murakami is one of the best writers around
Time Out
Norwegian Wood . . . not only points to but manifests the author's genius
Chicago Tribune
An intimate and dark story... A beautifully introspective novel that made me feel all the emotions
Cosmopolitan
Murakami must already rank among the world's greatest living novelists
Guardian

User Reviews

Book 4.0
Narration 1.0
4.0
1.0
I had read this previously, so was expecting that listening to the story would be a refreshing experience. Alas it was not, largely because the narration was a little tedious. Murakami is one of my favourite authors, but I doubt this would provide a satisfactory introduction to his body of work.
Alan Murphy 31/10/2025

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