Michael Booth is the author of seven non-fiction books including the award-winning, international best-sellers The Almost Nearly Perfect People: The Truth About the Nordic Miracle, and Sushi and Beyond: What the Japanese Know About Cooking. His books have been translated into more than 15 languages, the most recent is Three Tigers, One Mountain: A Journey Through the Bitter History and Current Conflicts of China, Korea, and Japan. He writes regularly for newspapers and magazines around the world, including The Sunday Times, Condé Nast Traveller, Asahi Shimbun, and Politiken. He is the Denmark correspondent for Monocle magazine and Monocle 24 Radio.
I wrote
Three Tigers, One Mountain: A Journey Through the Bitter History and Current Conflicts of China, Korea, and Japan
I suspect for a lot of people this will be the first fiction by a Japanese author they read. Murakami’s world can be dream-like, sometimes supernatural so, often, you don’t always notice the emotional impact of his stories. Norwegian Wood is one of his more ‘straightforward’ narratives, a timeless depiction of young love and all its agonies.
DISCOVER THE SHORT STORY COLLECTION THAT GAVE THE WORLD DRIVE MY CAR, THE BAFTA AND OSCAR WINNING FILM
A dazzling Sunday Times bestselling collection of short stories from the beloved internationally acclaimed Haruki Murakami.
Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious women, baseball and the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all.
Marked by the same wry humour that has defined his entire body of work, in…
What stays with you long after you read this is the authentic voice of the protagonist, and the compelling attention to detail of her life. Like all the best fiction, Murata-san takes you to an unfamiliar place, and makes it real and relevant.
Vivian Amberville® is a popular dark fantasy book series about a girl whose thoughts can reshape reality.
First in the series, The Weaver of Odds introduces 13-year-old Vivian to her power to alter luck, odds, and circumstances. She is a traveler between realities, whose imagination can twist reality into impossible…
Sometimes the Nobel committee does get it right. There is a stillness and a rare beauty to this tale of an ageing master of the board game go, fighting a losing battle, literally and figuratively. It manages to say so much about traditional Japanese mores and culture.
Go is a game of strategy in which two players attempt to surround each other's black or white stones. Simple in its fundamentals, infinitely complex in its execution, it is an essential expression of the Japanese sensibility. And in his fictional chronicle of a match played between a revered and invincible Master and a younger, more progressive challenger, Yasunari Kawabata captured the moment in which the immutable traditions of imperial Japan met the onslaught of the twentieth century.
The competition between the Master of Go and his opponent, Otake, is waged over several months and layered in ceremony. But beneath…
Mitchell is one of the greatest living English novelists, a virtuoso prose stylist and compelling explorer of ideas. He has often written about Japan, where he once lived. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet evokes a very curious place and time in Japanese history, the late eighteenth century, when the country was mostly closed to the world, apart from Dejima, a tiny man-made island in Nagasaki harbour which served as a quarantined Dutch trading post. I could also add another of his books set in contemporary Japan, ‘number9dream’ - a vivid, violent quest set in the Tokyo underworld.
The Sunday Times Number One Bestseller, from the author of CLOUD ATLAS and THE BONE CLOCKS.
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010
'Brilliant' - The Times 'A masterpiece' - Scotsman
Be transported to a place like no other: a tiny, man-made island in the bay of Nagasaki, for two hundred years the sole gateway between Japan and the West. Here, in the dying days of the 18th-century, a young Dutch clerk arrives to make his fortune. Instead he loses his heart.
Step onto the streets of Dejima and mingle with scheming traders, spies, interpreters, servants and concubines as two…
In The Romantics, Dr. Harrison Ramsey's meticulously planned life collides with the ex he swore to forget. A prosperous plastic surgeon, Harrison is a member of an elite, exclusive Houston club, while Zuri faces professional ruin after a messy breakup. When circumstances force them…
Until I started researching my own book about East Asia, I was quite ignorant about the experience of the Koreans in Japan, the ‘Zainichi’. This heart-rending family saga spanning most of the 20th century gave me greater insight than any history book.
* The million-copy bestseller* * National Book Award finalist * * One of the New York Times's 10 Best Books of 2017 * * Selected for Emma Watson's Our Shared Shelf book club *
'This is a captivating book... Min Jin Lee's novel takes us through four generations and each character's search for identity and success. It's a powerful story about resilience and compassion' BARACK OBAMA.
Yeongdo, Korea 1911. In a small fishing village on the banks of the East Sea, a club-footed, cleft-lipped man marries a fifteen-year-old girl. The couple have one child, their beloved daughter Sunja. When Sunja…
From the author of The Almost Nearly Perfect People, a lively tour through Japan, Korea, and China, exploring the intertwined cultures and often fraught history of these neighboring countries. There is an ancient Chinese proverb that states, "Two tigers cannot share the same mountain." However, in East Asia, there are three tigers on that mountain: China, Japan, and Korea, and they have a long history of turmoil and tension with each other. In his latest entertaining and thought-provoking narrative travelogue, Michael Booth sets out to discover how deep, really, is the enmity between these three "tiger" nations, and what prevents them from making peace.
A fast-paced literary thriller with a strong sci-fi element and loaded with existential questions. Beyond the entertainment value, this book takes a hard look at the perilous world of publishing, which is on a crash course to meet the nascent, no-holds-barred world of AI. Could these worlds co-exist, or will…
Transforming Pandora, women's fiction with a metaphysical undercurrent, is written with humour and a light touch. As the plot slips between two time frames, separated by more than thirty years, the reader explores her life and loves: her ups and downs.
