End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland: A New Translation (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series) by Haruki Murakami, Jay Rubin

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 1Q84 and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle comes a relentlessly inventive novel that dives deep into the very nature of consciousness.

“Fantastical, mysterious, and funny . . . a fantasy world that might have been penned by Franz Kafka.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

Across two parallel narratives, Murakami draws readers into a mind-bending universe in which Lauren Bacall, Bob Dylan, a split-brained data processor, a deranged scientist, his shockingly undemure granddaughter, and various thugs, librarians, and subterranean monsters collide to dazzling effect. What emerges is a novel that is at once a hilariously funny and a deeply serious meditation on the nature and uses of the mind. This unabridged edition uses the original Japanese title of the book, which was later inverted for foreign publications.