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Best Books of 2011

The top five fiction and top five nonfiction books as chosen by Washington Post editors, with excerpts from The Post’s reviews.

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 ‘1Q84,’ by Haruki Murakami. Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel (Knopf, $30.50). Murakami’s tightly plotted tour de force — in which a young woman is dropped into a parallel reality and a lonely would-be novelist’s life is undone — is both an eerie thriller and a moving love story. — Michael Dirda

Knopf /

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