Sputnik Sweetheart
Philip Gabriel, Haruki Murakami
Readers rate it 3.8 (485 on Hardcover)
240 pages · Released Oct 3, 2002 · Vintage
Content report card
Sputnik Sweetheart parent’s guide: what’s inside
Violence
What it offers
A note for parents
This is a literary novel for adults exploring themes of unrequited love, identity, and loss through a surreal, philosophical lens. While not explicitly graphic, it contains mature emotional and psychological content—including a central lesbian romance, mysterious disappearance, and existential dread—that is better suited to older teens and adults. The prose is introspective and melancholic rather than action-driven, with layered storytelling that rewards mature reflection.
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From the publisher
"The scenario is as simple as it is uncomfortable: a college student falls in love (once and for all, despite everything that transpires afterward) with a classmate whose devotion to Kerouac and an untidy writerly life precludes any personal commitments - until she meets a considerably older and far more sophisticated... "The scenario is as simple as it is uncomfortable: a college student falls in love (once and for all, despite everything that transpires afterward) with a classmate whose devotion to Kerouac and an untidy writerly life precludes any personal commitments - until she meets a considerably older and far more sophisticated businesswoman. It is through this wormhole that she enters Murakami's surreal yet humane universe, to which she serves as guide both for us and for her frustrated suitor, now a teacher. In the course of her travels from parochial Japan through Europe and ultimately to an island off the coast of Greece, she disappears without a trace, leaving only lineaments of her fate: computer accounts of bizarre events and stories within stories. The teacher, summoned to assist in the search for her, experiences his own ominous, haunting visions, which lead him nowhere but home to Japan - and there, under the expanse of deep space and the still-orbiting Sputnik, he finally achieves a true understanding of his beloved."--BOOK JACKET.
Shelved under
- Fiction
- Novela
- Maestros
- Missing persons
- Unrequited love
- Women novelists
- Businesswomen
- Teachers
- Lesbische Liebe
- Bindungslosigkeit
- Geschäftsfrau
- Schriftstellerin
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ISBN 9780099448471 · Vintage