Haruki Murakami has an elegant style that enraptures long after the final pages are read. A story at once tragic and fiercely liberating, Norwegian Wood is a read that will sweep you into the uncomfortably beautiful world of finding and loving who you are as you face this life that you cannot control. An intelligent, introspective and serious character, he navigates through his experiences with a simple honesty that allows readers to establish an immediate and extremely deep connection with him. The reader follows Toru, a college student, as he discovers how to let go of those he has lost, remembering them without living for them. Love in Norwegian Wood is not characterized by romantic gestures or grand declarations, but by the real, complicated, and inexplicable situations human beings experience. With this story of love - its end and beginning - Murakami plunges readers into the terrors of accepting the past and all of its painful incompleteness, and of letting yourself be present so to allow for a future. His elegant prose captures the intense experiences of loss and the terrifying emptiness it leaves within a person. In Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami explores what it means to feel love for someone and the consequences that this has upon the self. Perhaps these influences are what contribute to the infamous feeling of being in love, or perhaps they are just the left-overs - remnants of a physical and emotional connection that reason cannot explain. We all recognize moments in our past that brought a feeling, or a state of being that we will never experience again. We all know people or even places that give a shock to our hearts every time we see them. These lines on the first page of Norwegian Wood strike me every time I read them. “I straightened up and looked out the plane window at the dark clouds hanging over the North Sea, thinking of what I had lost in the course of my life: times gone forever, friends who had died or disappeared, feelings I would never know again.” What a nice looking book…with so much love inside / Laura Billett

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