Translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum

'Loaded with mystery, mysticism, sex and rock'n'roll. Fast-moving and funny,The narrative voice pulls like a diesel" Los Angeles Times

Sexual violence, metaphysical dread and hard-boiled detection - welcome to the parallel universe of Haruki Murakami.

High-class call girls billed to Mastercard. A psychic 13-year-old drop-out with a passion for Talking Heads. A hunky matinée idol doomed to play dentists and teachers. A one-armed, beach-combing poet, an uptight hotel clerk. One man caught in the web of this advanced capitalist mayhem. Combining this offbeat cast of characters with Murakami's idiosyncratic prose Dance Dance Dance is an assault on all the senses, a murder mystery that is also philosophical speculation, and a dark fable of advanced capitalism.

'There are novelists who dare to imagine the future - but none are as scrupulously, amusingly up-to-the- minute as Murakami" Newsday

Translated from the Japanese by jay Rubin

"Murakami's storytelling inspires intimacy. It's the kind of intimacy that can evolve between a reader and a book, unspoken and unexpected, familiar, satisfying, strange" Jane Mendelsohn, Village, Voice

The economy was booming. People had more money than they knew what to do with. And then the earthquake struck.
Komura's wife follows the TV reports all day. The same images appear again and again: flames, smoke, buildings turned to rubble, fires everywhere. Pure hell. For the characters in Murakami's latest short story collection, the Kobe earthquake is an echo from a past they buried long ago.
Satsuki has spent 30 years hating one man: a lover who destroyed her chances of having children, and who now lives in Kobe. Did her desire for revenge cause the earthquake? Junpei's estranged parents also live in Kobe.
Should he contact them? Four-year-old Sala has nightmares that the Earthquake Man is trying to stuff her and everyone else into a little box. Unappreciated and unpromoted, Katagiri returns home to find a giant frog in his apartment on a mission to save Tokyo from a massive worm burrowing under the Tokyo Security Trust Bank. ")"en he gets angry, he causes earth- quakes," says Frog. "And right now he is very, very angry."

"Western critics searching for parallels have variously likened him to Carver, Chandler, Arthur C. Clarke, DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis and Pynchon - a roster so ill assorted as to suggest that Murakami may in fact be an original" Jamie James, New York Times

Lost in space or a loser in love? Twenty-two year-old Sumire is in love for the first time - with a woman seventeen years her senior. But whereas Miu is a glamorous and successful older woman with a taste for classical music and fine wine, Sumire is an aspiring writer who dresses in an oversized second-hand coat and heavy boots like a character in a Jack Kerouac novel. Surprised that she might, after all, be a lesbian, 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 about her? K., a primary school teacher, is used to answering questions, but what he most wants to say to Sumire is, "I love you." He consoles himself by having an affair with the mother of one of his pupils. But when a desperate Miu calls him out of the blue from a sunny Greek island and asks for his help, he soon discovers that all is not as it seems and something very strange has happened to Sumire.

The contemporaryand the mythic collide in a hard-boiled tale of computersand conspiracy theories, unicorns and ancientlands.

If the world of Haruki Murakami is one where East meets West nowhere are the two more scrambled than in this narrative particle accelerator of a novel in which a split-brained data-processor, a deranged scientist, his shockingly undemure granddaughter, Lauren Bacall, Bob Dylan, thugs, librarians and subterranean monsters collide to dazzling effect. What emerges is an extremely funny yet deeply serious meditation on the nature and uses of the mind.

"Murakami's bold willingness to go straight over the top is a signal indication of his genius . . . a world class writer who has both eyes open and takes big risks" Washington Post
"He has become the foremost representative of the new style of Japanese writing: hip, cynical, highly stylized, set at the juncture of cyberpunk, post modernism and hard-boiled detective fiction . . . Murakami is adept at outrageous wit, outrageous style" Los Angeles Times

The mystery of the light in Vermeer's famous painting illuminates a writer's love for his mother; a travelling lingerie salesman is helped miraculously by a rock musician as he waits for his son who has run away; an emigrant returned from America describes his experiences to his nephew . . .

"Truly masterly pieces of contemporary storytelling" Santos Alonso, Diariol6
"The collection proves that Manuel Rivas is ready to tackle themes of major importance... Constantly rewarding" Ricardo Senabre, ABC
"Manuel Rivas knows how to show the mixture of cruelty and tenderness that lie behind human activity" Joaquin Arnaiz, Mundo

Translated from the Galician by Jonathan Dunne

"A very beautiful novel, full of humanity and tenderness"Arturo Perez- Reverte

A timeless love story that grew out of the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and an outstanding European novel.
In a prison in the city of Santiago de Compostela, during the early months of 1936, an artist sketches the famous porch of the cathedral that is known as the Portico da Gloria. He uses a carpenter's pencil. But instead of repro ducing the faces of the prophets and elders on the sculptured portal, he replaces them with those of his Republican prison inmates. A warden, his future murderer, watches in fascination ...
This deeply poetic and moving novel explores the tragedy of the civil war that engulfed Spain and so shook the rest of the world, as well as the memories of the men and women who survived. In the process, it relates one of the most unforgettable love stories imaginable.

"He is an important storyteller because he is sensitive and he has an incredible ear, which, in his fiction, is allied to great ingenuity' John Berger