The Love We Share Without Knowing (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780553385649)

In this haunting, richly woven novel of modern life in Japan, the author of the acclaimed debut One for Sorrow explores the ties that bind humanity across the deepest divides. Here is a Murakamiesque jewel box of intertwined narratives in which the lives of several strangers are gently linked through love, loss, and fate.

On a train filled with quietly sleeping passengers, a young man's life is forever altered when he is miraculously seen by a blind man. In a quiet town an American teacher who has lost her Japanese lover to death begins to lose her own self. On a remote road amid fallow rice fields, four young friends carefully take their own lives--and in that moment they become almost as one. In a small village a disaffected American teenager stranded in a strange land discovers compassion after an encounter with an enigmatic red fox, and in Tokyo a girl named Love learns the deepest lessons about its true meaning from a coma patient lost in dreams of an affair gone wrong.

From the neon colors of Tokyo, with its game centers and karaoke bars, to the bamboo groves and hidden shrines of the countryside, these souls and others mingle, revealing a profound tale of connection--uncovering the love we share without knowing.

Exquisitely perceptive and deeply affecting, Barzak's artful storytelling deftly illuminates the inner lives of those attempting to find--or lose--themselves in an often incomprehensible world.

Author: Christopher Barzak
ISBN-10: 055338564X
ISBN-13: 9780553385649
Publisher: Bantam
Language: English
Published: 11/25/2008
Pages: 304
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.53lbs
Size: 8.22h x 5.23w x 0.67d
Award: Nebula Awards - Nominee

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 09/22/2008 pg. 38
Booklist 11/01/2008 pg. 22
Romantic Times 01/01/2009 pg. 54 - Excellent
Library Journal Annex 12/09/2008
Library Journal 12/09/2008