The North Light

A Financial Times Translated Fiction Book of the Year

Translated from the Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai

Minoru Aose is an architect whose greatest achievement is to have designed the Yoshino house, a prizewinning and much discussed private residence built in the shadow of Mount Asama. Aose has never been able to replicate this triumph and his career seems to have hit a barrier, while his marriage has failed. He is shocked to learn that the Yoshino House is empty apart from a single chair, stood facing the north light of nearby Mount Asama.

How can he live with the rejection of the work he had put his heart and soul into, the dream house he would have loved to own himself? Aose determines that he must discover the truth behind this cruel and inexplicable dismissal of the Yoshino house and in doing so will find out a truth that goes back to the core of who he is.

Plotted with the subtlety of his bestselling masterpiece Six Four, The North Light is Yokoyama at his elusive, tantalising and surprising best.

Japan's Master of Mystery and one of the country's most consistently engaging and brilliant novelists. -- David Peace
This is a fascinating novel about guilt, shame and redemption, which offers insights into the subtleties and frustrations of creativity, as well as many different kinds of relationship. Literary Review
A multilayered, offbeat, bittersweet and utterly engrossing meditation on ambition, creativity, guilt, and workplace and family relationships. Guardian

Hideo Yokoyama (Author)Born in 1957, Hideo Yokoyama worked for twelve years as an investigative reporter with a regional newspaper north of Tokyo, before becoming one of Japan's most acclaimed fiction writers. His exhaustive and relentless work ethic is known to mirror the intense and obsessive behaviour of his characters; and in January 2003 he was hospitalized following a heart attack brought about by working constantly for seventy-two hours. Six Four is his sixth novel, and his first to be published in the English language.

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