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Love it or hate it, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is on the Norwegian Wood side of Haruki Murakami's writing, dealing with personality issues and difficult relationships, but it still has the author's familiar diversions into surrealism, magic realism, post-modernism or whatever you want to call the dream-like flights of imagination and strange connections that his sensitive characters establish with the world around them. At the heart of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is a typically sensitive young man, a misfit with emotional problems who struggles with relationships. It wasn't always that way, Tazaki once an equal part of a close-knit group of five friends in Nagoya. Murakami's unique outlook on the dynamic of the group is interesting, each of the two boys and two girls having a name that refers to a colour, while Tazaki is "colourless". And in some ways that reflect how TT sees himself. When Tazaki leaves to go to university in Tokyo, he finds himself inexplicably...

Social inclinations and violent implications The altered perspective novel from the view of a disaffected teenager, often with a mental disability, is practically a genre in itself by now. Alice and the Fly is one of those books - written journal-style from the perspective of a kid who is a bit 'special', who thinks and sees the world differently. Seen in that light, James Rice's Alice and the Fly doesn't have anything particularly new to add to the genre, but the novel is never less than deeply involving, the writing often impressive, with a good eye for character and dialogue. Greg comes from a line that includes J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield and Matthew Quick's Leonard Peacock. He doesn't fit in well at school, is withdrawn and has a pronounced lisp. He's bullied by his classmates at school and ignored at home by a family that is rather wrapped up in their own petty middle-class social concerns and ambitions. A loner with a fondness for classic r...

Generation now From Bret Easton Ellis to Donna Tartt's Goldfinch , is there a movement in recent literature that is warning us of a new "lost generation"? Is this something we should be worried about, or is it something that has always been there, and part of the generational divide? From Salinger's Holden Caulfield - but probably even before then - the change to the modern world has undoubtedly caused emotional problems for lost youths looking for love and stability in their lives. If seen in that respect, Matt Szymanowski's Cupertino is probably nothing new, but there is a growing sense from this latest account that the modern lifestyle is indeed generating an increasingly dysfunctional society. In Cupertino  we are introduced to another young man who isn't exactly an orphan, but might as well be. Stevo and his friends are all about good times, enjoying life to the max - parties, girls, drink, drugs, porn and sometimes running into trouble with the authorit...

If you didn't already know how dangerous a place Area X is from Annihilation , the first of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, by the time you start reading Authority and get the first glimpse of the world outside that is trying to explore and contain it, the full horror of the phenomenon starts to become apparent. By the end of the Authority too, the mystery, the danger and the scope of the trilogy's concept takes a leap to another level, but in-between it has to be said, there's a lot of confusion and inconsistency in this middle section of the work as a whole. Annihilation took us straight into Area X with an expedition exploring a section of costal landscape that exhibits strange and dangerous phenomena, posing a threat to the Southern Reach. Previous expeditions have been unsuccessful and have resulted in deaths, disappearances and damage to individuals who have been part of the exploration teams. In Authority , a new director called Control, has been ass...