South of the Border, West of the Sun, by Haruki Murakami (Harvill, £6.99 in UK)

Hajime tells his story from a solitary boyhood passed partly in the company of a girl who was his best friend, to his late thirties: happily married, financially successful and miserable. In between there was an intense teenage romance which ended very badly for the girl. Suddenly his childhood friend, now grown, mysterious and dangerous, walks back into his ordered life and proceeds to obsess him. Murakami, contemporary Japanese fiction's voice in the West, is a wonderful writer; lively, original and compulsively engaging. The thoughtful urgency of this taut narrative proves quite overpowering. All you ever wanted to know about romantic agony is conveyed brilliantly by a confused, detached narrator who, for his self-absorption and emotional ruthlessness, is sympathetic. Though set in present-day, ultra-modern Tokyo it is really a 19th-century romance full of pain, yearning and apathy.