Great reads

Toru Okada is a man with problems. He's unemployed, his cat has vanished and his wife, inexplicably, does not co me home from work. In the meantime, he's receiving the strangest phone calls from an anonymous woman who seems to not only know him very well but is determined to seduce him. For a man who usually opts to lie low, staying at home, cooking for his self assured spouse and listening to Jazz, Toru is very quickly way in over his head.

Soon caught up in a hunt for both his wife (and his cat), Toru days begin to get increasingly bizarre as he meets an eccentric collection of characters including two sisters with a psychic bent, a possibly unbalanced teenager, a politician of dubious morals and an old soldier who witnessed the Japanese atrocities on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War.

Murakami is a delight - fluid, mysterious and unpredictable – he imbues the mundane with menace, while the truly weird is accepted without even a blink of a literary eye. The plot – which leaps detective story to explicit sexual fantasy, from tragic flashbacks to WWII to the mundane details of married life – demands your undivided attention. As always with Murakami, understanding seems to lurk just beyond the next page, just out of reach, not only for is characters but for his readers as well. With him, one knows one may very well be drawn into a mystery that will not be wrapped up neatly by the last page.

As a meditation on Japanese society at the turn of the century, Murakami explores both the impact of the almost forgotten past and of the rapidly evolving present on personal identity. When combined with his penchant for pop culture references, music and movies, the result is a book that aspires to simultaneously skim the surface and plumb the depths of life in Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.

When Dorothy triumphed over the wicked Witch in L.Frank Baum's classic take, we heard only her side of the story. But what about her arch-nemesis, the mysterious Witch? Where did she come from? How did she become so wicked? And what is the nature of evil? Meet Elphaba, a smart, prickly and misunderstood creature who challenges all out preconceived notions about the nature of good and evil. With 'Wicked,' Gregory Macguire creates a fantasy world so rich and vivid that we will never look at Oz the same way again.

A psychological self-portrait, a clear-eyed social study, and a profound meditation upon the artistic process, Marcel Proust's monumental, encyclopedic masterpiece 'À la recherche du temps perdu' (In Search of Lost Time) changed the course of twentieth-century literature. Swann's Way, the first of seven volumes, introduces the novel's major themes and its unnamed narrator – an introspective man drawn, in his youth, to fashionable society, like the author himself.

Swann's Way begins with the narrator's reminisces of early childhood, (including, famously, his evocative memory of eating a pastry called a madeleine) and moves on to focus on wealthy connoisseur Charles Swann and his obsessive relationship with the vulgar but radiant courtesan Odette. Using his narrator's consciousness, Proust offers readers a comprehensive portrait of the high society of Paris from the 1870s through the First World War.

In retirement in the English countryside, an 89-year-old man, vaguely remembered by the villagers as a once famous detective, is more concerned with his bees than with the outside world. When a serious young boy and his beloved parrot enter the old man's life, he is surprised and oddly touched. The boy, an escapee from Nazi Germany is mute. The bird spews out strings of German numbers. What do they mean? Some around the boy seem to think the numbers are significant, even profitable. When someone is killed and the parrot disappears, the old man is determined to do all he can, despite his failing powers, to reunite the boy with his only friend.