Killing Commendatore
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  • Published: 9 October 2018
  • ISBN: 9781473549456
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 28 hr 27 min
  • Narrator: Kirby Heyborne
  • RRP: $32.99

Killing Commendatore

Formats & editions
Paperback
1 Oct 2019
EBook
9 Oct 2018
Audiobook
9 Oct 2018
Audio CD
6 Aug 2019
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The ambitious major new novel from this internationally celebrated writer, on the scale of his bestselling 1Q84

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami, read by Kirby Heyborne.

The epic new novel from the internationally acclaimed and best-selling author of 1Q84.
In Killing Commendatore, a thirty-something portrait painter in Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. When he discovers a strange painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances. To close it, he must complete a journey that involves a mysterious ringing bell, a two-foot-high physical manifestation of an Idea, a dapper businessman who lives across the valley, a precocious thirteen-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt during World War II in Vienna, a pit in the woods behind the artist’s home, and an underworld haunted by Double Metaphors.

A tour de force of love and loneliness, war and art – as well as a loving homage to The Great Gatsby – Killing Commendatore is a stunning work of imagination from one of our greatest writers.
  • Published: 9 October 2018
  • ISBN: 9781473549456
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 28 hr 27 min
  • Narrator: Kirby Heyborne
  • RRP: $32.99
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About the author

Haruki Murakami

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers’ award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami’s unique and addictive fictional universe.

Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring Murakami’s place as one of the world’s most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

portrait photo of Haruki Murakami

Also by Haruki Murakami

Norwegian Wood
Kafka on the Shore
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
The City and Its Uncertain Walls
Novelist as a Vocation
Murakami T
First Person Singular
See all

Praise for Killing Commendatore

It’s safe to say that there’s no one like Murakami

Literary Review

Written in a simple, readable style that leaves you free to concentrate on the weirdness of the content… There is no other writer able to give us the fix that his unique qualities provide

Sunday Express

An immersive big-hearted new novel

Independent

Murakami’s reality has many sides; some plain, some fancy. Translators Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen capture every colour on this mind-altering palette. No other author mixes domestic, fantastic and esoteric elements into such weirdly bewitching shades. Murakami’s "Land of Metaphor" remains a country where wonders never cease

Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times

Murakami keeps the reader gripped

The Week

Murakami dancing along ‘the inky blackness of the Path of Metaphor’ is like Fred Astaire dancing across a floor, then up the walls and onto the ceiling... Killing Commendatore is a perfect balance of tradition and individual talent

Spectator

I found it totally gripping with scarcely a dull page, the loose ends enhancing its mystery. An absorbing work by a great writer

Daily Express

In this novel, [Murakami] captures the creative process compellingly… The complex landscape that Murakami assembles in Killing Commendatore is a word portrait of the artist’s inner life

Times Literary Supplement

Expansive and intricate . . . touches on many of the themes familiar in Mr. Murakami’s novels: the mystery of romantic love, the weight of history, the transcendence of art, the search for elusive things just outside our grasp

New York Times

Exhilarating. . . . Only in the calm madness of his magical realism can Murakami truly capture one of his obsessions, the usually ineffable yearning that drives a person to make art

Washington Post

Wild, thrilling. . . Murakami is a master storyteller and he knows how to keep us hooked

Sunday Times

Rich, sprawling… Killing Commendatore is a… powerful, sustained meditation on how we engage with works of art

Daily Telegraph

Brilliant… Murakami is good company, that most precious of qualities in an author

Xan Brooks, Guardian

Murakami has produced a captivating novel, full of otherworldly detours and fascinating digressions

Jane Shilling, Daily Mail

One of the most influential novelists of his generation

Observer

Discover more

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Murakami Art Competition shortlist

Announcing the shortlist and overall winner for the Murakami Art Competition.

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On design: Killing Commendatore

Suzanne Dean, creative director at Vintage, shares the creative process for designing the cover for Haruki Murakami’s latest novel.

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Murakami Art Competition

To celebrate the release of Killing Commendatore, the new novel from Haruki Murakami, we’re giving you the chance to win $1,000 and a feature in Underline magazine.