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This book has left me thinking about the apathy, fatalism and almost the complete lack of affect by the protagonist, Meursault. I understand it is a commentary, as the back of the book says, on the "absurdity of life" but a life without ambition or feeling strikes me as very incongruous.

I bought this book because someone had tweeted it was on sale at the Kindle store, and after reading it I'd say I have a love / relationship with it. It's almost impossible to read about relationships objectively as you filter it through your own experiences, so by the time I'd finished it I couldn't decide it was realistic or an overly romantic tale.

I didn't enjoy this as much as the first two books which set up the plot and its twists very well whilst this followed a trajectory that was more linear and left a lot of questions unanswered.

I was a bit sceptical about reading another Murakami book, I've read quite a few of them and found them great books but all too similar in their style and themes, however once I started reading the sample chapter I found myself hooked.

The two main characters, Tengo and Aomame, drive the book with the chapters alternating between the two. Most of the time the text is dedicated to character development but sometimes the plot starts moving quite quickly.