With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come. This magnificent new novel has a similarly extraordinary scope and the same capacity to amaze, entertain, and bewitch the reader....

Living in an igloo of ice and trash bags half a year after a cataclysmic nuclear disaster, Emily, convinced that she will be hated as the daughter of the drunken father who caused the meltdown, assumes a fictional identity while protecting a homeless boy.

Will Robie, a freelance hitman working for the government, rescues a teenage girl whose parents' disappearance may be linked to a vast, high-level cover-up

Runaways Axi, sixteen, and Robinson, seventeen, who met on a cancer ward, leave small-town Oregon on a cross-country trip to experience the best of life before it is too late

Anna Larson's daughter, Lauren, became pregnant while she was at college and decided to keep the baby, Sarah, but life had not been easy for them. When Sarah was only sixteen years old, she ran away from home. It is now Sarah's eighteenth birthday and neither Anna nor Lauren have heard from her in all this time. Anna is certain that her granddaughter is dead. But suddenly, Sarah shows up at the Inn at Shining Waters, a mere shell of her old self....

During one twenty-seven-hour night, four youths from very different backgrounds must stop the war between the colonies and an army of monsters while handling their own worst fears and secret desires. Rumor Mora fears hellhounds too strong for him to kill, and failure. Jude Welton dreams that humans will stop killing monsters, and his strange abilities will vanish. In no reality should a boy raised to love monsters fall for a boy raised to kill them....

"When Pearl runs away from her abusive father, she has nowhere to go--until she stumbles upon a disguise that gives her the key to a new identity. Reborn as a boy named Soupy, she hitches her star to Ramshackle, a hobo who takes her under his wing. Ramshackle's kindness and protection go a long way toward helping Soupy heal from her difficult past. But he has his own demons to wrestle with, and he'll need Soupy just as much as she needs him. Two misfits...

Beverly Tapinski has run away from home plenty of times, but that was when she was just a kid. By now, she figures, it's not running away. It's leaving. Determined to make it on her own, Beverly finds a job and a place to live and tries to forget about her dog, Buddy, now buried underneath the orange trees back home; her friend Raymie, whom she left without a word; and her mom, Rhonda, who has never cared about anyone but herself. Beverly doesn't...