Kristina's staffpicks

The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.

A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question.” Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.

As Aomame’s and Tengo’s narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector.

A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell’s—1Q84 is Haruki Murakami’s most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.

An exploration of Wharton Esherick's artistic evolution during the early decades of the twentieth century. Based on the exhibition in the Kamin and Kroiz Galleries of the University of Pennsylvania, this work expands upon the exhibition's themes with well over 300 vibrant images and current research, including an essay by Paul Eisenhauer, Curator of the Wharton Esherick Museum. Esherick experimented with woodcarving and printmaking, laying the foundations for his emergence as an artist of remarkable range. He produced paintings and woodblock prints, set designs, sculpture, furniture, and architecture. He and his community of friends created an artistic circle in which arts and crafts were joined, and in which radical new ideas flourished, helping to shape the course of American Modernism. This book will be a treasure for all who appreciate twentieth-century modernism.

Christopher Ondaatje is a true child of the British Empire. Born in Ceylon in 1933 and brought up on a tea plantation, he was sent as a teenager to boarding school in England. But soon after Ceylon was granted its independence in 1948, his family found themselves destitute, and the young Ondaatje left school and got a job. In 1956 he made his way to Canada with just thirteen dollars in his pocket. From this improbable beginning there followed a series of commercial triumphs until 1988 when he abruptly abandoned high finance at the peak of his career and reinvented himself as an explorer and author, focusing mainly on the colonial period. It is the curious encounters behind these often precarious adventures that make up The Last Colonial. The stories tell of Ondaatje’s childhood days in Ceylon, his early life in Canada, his fascination with inexplicable events and local superstitions, and his sometimes perilous travels researching biographies of Ernest Hemingway in Africa, Leonard Woolf in Ceylon, and Sir Richard Burton in India and Africa. Complemented by the artist Ana Maria Pacheco’s magical, sometimes disturbing illustrations, the stories conjure up a truly unique portrait of a world that is vanishing forever. 30 full-color illustrations.

Drawing on George Harrison’s personal archive of photographs, letters, diaries, and memorabilia, Olivia Harrison reveals the arc of his life, from his guitar-obsessed boyhood in Liverpool, to the astonishment of the Beatles years, to his days as an independent musician and bohemian squire. Here too is the record of Harrison’s lifelong commitment to Indian music, and his adventures as a movie producer, Traveling Wilbury, and Formula One racing fan. The book is filled with stories and reminiscences from Harrison’s friends, including Eric Clapton, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and many, many others. Among its previously unpublished riches are photographs taken by Harrison himself beginning in the mid-1960s. It is a rich tribute to a man who died far too young, but who touched the lives of millions.

A landmark work that pays splendid homage to a forgotten era of seminal American music. 96 pp. 25,000 print.