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Best Books of 2011

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

‘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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