What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
By Haruki Murakami
Translated by Philip Gabriel
Harvill Secker £9.99 192 pages
FT Bookshop price: £7.99

Three types of readers will enjoy Haruki Murakami’s latest offering, a slim volume called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Diehard Murakami fans, hungry for biographical information about the publicity-shy Japanese writer, are the first type. Second are long-distance runners, hoping to learn from Murakami’s history of competing in marathons (more than 25 so far), as well as ultra-marathons and triathlons. In the third category are aspiring authors, wishing for wisdom from chapters with headings such as “Most of what I know about writing fiction I learned from running every day”.