That.

I picked up the first book of Murakami Haruki IQ84's trilogy (it just came out in English too, I've seen - the first two volumes in one book - about 1100 pages I guess, and the third by the end of the month, lucky you. They've used only one translator in French - a team of two in the US - so it comes out only next March for us) and got swallowed up completely into it. I finished the near 600 pages in two days, rather unusual for me, but I just couldn't let it go. Awesome "magical realism", full of food for thought and references (Orwell, Dickens, Russian literature, you name it), something of an anti-1984 (rather than a vision of the future, it's a kind of uchronia. Instead of big brother, you have mysterious and elusive Little People, and history isn't rewritten, it's being subtly changed - maybe...). It even has something of a manga vibe (it would lend itself to an awesome manga adaptation). As for the title, the letter Q is homonym of kyû, ie the number 9 in Japanese, though the in-story explanation is something else altogether.

Definitely one of my favourite novels this year, and definitely the best by Murakami I've read (four novels out of all those he wrote). Not really surprised it sparked a phenomenon compared to Harry Potter's in Japan (even though it's a fairly literary novel, and definitely for adults only) - or that it got midnight release events even in the US.

It's terribly hard to summarize (especially without spoilers, and it's really not a book for which it's a good idea to spoil the surprises and twists) but loosely it's the parralel stories (told in alternance) of a female martial arts teacher who's also a killer for hire/vigilante, and a male mathematics teacher and wannabe novelist, hired to rewrite the awesomely imaginative (but atrociously written) novel of a 17 y.o. dyslexic and very weird girl, who can barely make a full sentence in conversation but can recite pages and pages of ancient epics. The woman character rapidly notices she seems to have shifted - an open question - to this alternate universe she coins 1Q84, a universe suspiciously similar to the one described in the novel of the weird young girl.

No idea what will follow after I finish the second book, perhaps some of his older novels. I have a few volumes of Death Note to finish too.