Sputnik Sweetheart
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  • Published: 1 November 2002
  • ISBN: 9780099448471
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $22.99

Sputnik Sweetheart

Formats & editions
Paperback
1 Nov 2002
Hardback
24 Oct 2023
EBook
10 Oct 2011
Audiobook
11 Mar 2021
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A mystery story about love, the cosmos and other fictional universes

*PRE-ORDER HARUKI MURAKAMI’S NEW NOVEL, THE CITY AND ITS UNCERTAIN WALLS, NOW*

A mystery story about love, the cosmos and other fictional universes.

Sumire is in love with a woman seventeen years her senior. Miu is glamorous and successful. Sumire is an aspiring writer who dresses in an oversized second-hand coat and heavy boots like a character in a Kerouac novel.

Sumire spends hours on the phone talking to her best friend K about the big questions in life: what is sexual desire, and should she ever tell Miu how she feels for her? Meanwhile K wonders whether he should confess his own unrequited love for Sumire.

Then, a desperate Miu calls from a small Greek island: Sumire has mysteriously vanished...

'Confirms Murakami as a master of his craft... Out of this world' Time Out
  • Published: 1 November 2002
  • ISBN: 9780099448471
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

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
The City and Its Uncertain Walls
Kafka on the Shore
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
1Q84
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)
Men Without Women
See all

Praise for Sputnik Sweetheart

Sputnik Sweetheart has touched me deeper and pushed me further than anything I've read in a long time

Julie Myerson, Guardian

How does Murakami manage to make poetry while writing of contemporary life and emotions? I am weak-kneed with admiration

Independent on Sunday

Murakami has been compared to everyone from Raymond Carver to Raymond Chandler - which should tell you only one thing: he's unique

Independent

A beautiful novel, as light as a feather, and yet enduringly sad... a captivating book from one of the world's most interesting authors

Sunday Herald

Confirms Murakami as a master of his craft... Out of this world

Time Out

Grabs you from its opening lines. . . . [Murakami's] never written anything more openly emotional.

Los Angeles Magazine

Murakami is a genius.

Chicago Tribune

Murakami has an unmatched gift for turning psychological metaphors into uncanny narratives. -

The New York Times Book Review

An agonizing, sweet story about the power and the pain of love. . . . Immensely deepened by perfect little images that leave much to be filled in by the reader's heart or eye.

The Baltimore Sun

[Murakami belongs] in the topmost rank of writers of international stature.

Newsday

Murakami's true achievement lies in the humor and vision he brings to even the most despairing moments.

The New Yorker

Perhaps better than any contemporary writer, [Murakami] captures and lays bare the raw human emotion of longing.

BookPage

Murakami . . . has a deep interest in the alienation of self, which lifts [Sputnik Sweetheart] into both fantasy and philosophy.

San Francisco Chronicle

Not just a great Japanese writer but a great writer, period.

Los Angeles Times Book Review
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