David Mitchell

From award-winning writer David Mitchell comes a sinewy, meditative novel of boyhood on the cusp of adulthood and the old on the cusp of the new.Black Swan Green tracks a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the thirteen chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy. A world of Kissingeresque realpolitik enacted in boys’ games on a frozen lake; of “nightcreeping” through the summer backyards of strangers; of the tabloid-fueled thrills of the Falklands War and its human toll; of the cruel, luscious Dawn Madden and her power-hungry boyfriend, Ross Wilcox; of a certain Madame Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, an elderly bohemian emigré who is both more and less than she appears; of Jason’s search to replace his dead grandfather’s irreplaceable smashed watch before the crime is discovered; of first cigarettes, first kisses, first Duran Duran LPs, and first deaths; of Margaret Thatcher’s recession; of Gypsies camping in the woods and the hysteria they inspire; and, even closer to home, of a slow-motion divorce in four seasons.Pointed, funny, profound, left-field, elegiac, and painted with the stuff of life, Black Swan Green is David Mitchell’s most subtlest and effective achievement to date.

By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas | Longlisted for the Man Booker PrizeThe year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay. To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, and costly courtesans comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiancée back in Holland. But Jacob’s original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured midwife to the city’s powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken—the consequences of which will extend beyond Jacob’s worst imaginings.

A postmodern visionary who is also a master of styles of genres, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian lore of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction as profund as it is playful. Now in his new novel, David Mitchell explores with daring artistry fundamental questions of reality and identity. Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. . . . Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. . . . From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life. . . . And onward, with dazzling virtuosity, to an inglorious present-day England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history. But the story doesn't end even there. The narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky. As wild as a videogame, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.

Number9Dream is the international literary sensation from a writer with astonishing range and imaginative energy—an intoxicating ride through Tokyo’s dark underworlds and the even more mysterious landscapes of our collective dreams.David Mitchell follows his eerily precocious, globe-striding first novel, Ghostwritten , with a work that is in its way even more ambitious. In outward form, Number9Dream is a Dickensian coming-of-age Young dreamer Eiji Miyake, from remote rural Japan, thrust out on his own by his sister’s death and his mother’s breakdown, comes to Tokyo in pursuit of the father who abandoned him. Stumbling around this strange, awesome city, he trips over and crosses—through a hidden destiny or just monstrously bad luck—a number of its secret power centers. Suddenly, the riddle of his father’s identity becomes just one of the increasingly urgent questions Eiji must answer. Why is the line between the world of his experiences and the world of his dreams so blurry? Why do so many horrible things keep happening to him? What is it about the number 9? To answer these questions, and ultimately to come to terms with his inheritance, Eiji must somehow acquire an insight into the workings of history and fate that would be rare in anyone, much less in a boy from out of town with a price on his head and less than the cost of a Beatles disc to his name.

A gallery attendant at the Hermitage. A young jazz buff in Tokyo. A crooked British lawyer in Hong Kong. A disc jockey in Manhattan. A physicist in Ireland. An elderly woman running a tea shack in rural China. A cult-controlled terrorist in Okinawa. A musician in London. A transmigrating spirit in Mongolia. What is the common thread of coincidence or destiny that connects the lives of these nine souls in nine far-flung countries, stretching across the globe from east to west? What pattern do their linked fates form through time and space?A writer of pyrotechnic virtuosity and profound compassion, a mind to which nothing human is alien, David Mitchell spins genres, cultures, and ideas like gossamer threads around and through these nine linked stories. Many forces bind these lives, but at root all involve the same universal longing for connection and transcendence, an axis of commonality that leads in two directions—to creation and to destruction. In the end, as lives converge with a fearful symmetry, Ghostwritten comes full circle, to a point at which a familiar idea—that whether the planet is vast or small is merely a matter of perspective—strikes home with the force of a new revelation. It marks the debut novel of a writer with astonishing gifts.

Following a scalding row with her mother, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: a sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as “the radio people,” Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life.For Holly has caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics—and their enemies. But her lost weekend is merely the prelude to a shocking disappearance that leaves her family irrevocably scarred. This unsolved mystery will echo through every decade of Holly’s life, affecting all the people Holly loves—even the ones who are not yet born.A Cambridge scholarship boy grooming himself for wealth and influence, a conflicted father who feels alive only while reporting from occupied Iraq, a middle-aged writer mourning his exile from the bestseller list—all have a part to play in this surreal, invisible war on the margins of our world. From the medieval Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a hotel in Shanghai to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future, their stories come together in moments of everyday grace and extraordinary wonder.

Keep your eyes peeled for a small black iron door. Down the road from a working-class British pub, along the brick wall of a narrow alley, if the conditions are exactly right, you’ll find the entrance to Slade House. A stranger will greet you by name and invite you inside. At first, you won’t want to leave. Later, you’ll find that you can’t. Every nine years, the house’s residents — an odd brother and sister — extend a unique invitation to someone who’s different or lonely: a precocious teenager, a recently divorced policeman, a shy college student. But what really goes on inside Slade House? For those who find out, it’s already too late... Spanning five decades, from the last days of the 1970s to the present, leaping genres, and barreling toward an astonishing conclusion, this intricately woven novel will pull you into a reality-warping new vision of the haunted house story—as only David Mitchell could imagine it.

The long-awaited new novel from the bestselling, prize-winning author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks.Utopia Avenue is the strangest British band you’ve never heard of. Emerging from London’s psychedelic scene in 1967 and fronted by folk singer Elf Holloway, guitar demigod Jasper de Zoet, and blues bassist Dean Moss, Utopia Avenue released only two LPs during its brief, blazing journey from the clubs of Soho and drafty ballrooms to Top of the Pops and the cusp of chart success, and on to glory in Amsterdam, prison in Rome, and a fateful American fortnight in the autumn of 1968.David Mitchell’s captivating new novel tells the unexpurgated story of Utopia Avenue; of riots in the streets and revolutions in the head; of drugs, thugs, madness, love, sex, death, art; of the families we choose and the ones we don’t; of fame’s Faustian pact and stardom’s wobbly ladder. Can we change the world in turbulent times, or does the world change us?

The story is being narrated in the present tense by a boy tripping on his mother's Valium pills. He likes Valium because it reduces the bruising hurly-burly of the world into orderly, bite-sized 'pulses'. So the boy is essentially thinking and experiencing in Tweets," said Mitchell. "My hope is then that the rationale for deploying Twitter comes from inside the story, rather than it being imposed by me, from outside, as a gimmick. Usefully, the Valium also lets me walk that 'Turn of the Screw' tightrope between the fabulous and realism: maybe the supernatural events are really happening, or maybe they're just chemical phantasms.http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014...

In one virtuosic, mind-bending novel after another, David Mitchell continues to strengthen his reputation as "one of the more fascinating and fearless writers alive" (Dave Eggers, "The New York Times Book Review") and "the novelist who's been showing us the future of fiction" (Ron Charles, "The Washington Post"). Now three of his acclaimed novels--"Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green, "and "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet"--are collected in one extraordinary eBook bundle. And coming in September--don't miss "The Bone Clocks, "David Mitchell's epic new novel about a fifteen-year-old English runaway who slams the door on her old life only to stumble into a supernatural war of good and evil on the margins of our world. CLOUD ATLAS "Mitchell is, clearly, a genius. He writes as though at the helm of some perpetual dream machine."--"The New York Times Book Review" In 1850, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California is befriended by a physician who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. In 1931 Belgium, a disinherited bisexual composer contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro with a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. On the West Coast in the 1970s, a troubled reporter stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder. The narrative jumps onward to an inglorious present-day England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history--then boomerangs back through centuries and space, revealing how these disparate characters connect and how their fates intertwine. BLACK SWAN GREEN "As in the works of Thomas Pynchon and Herman Melville, one feels the roof of the narrative lifted off and oneself in thrall."--"Time" Thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor lives in the sleepiest, muddiest village in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But over the course of a single year, Jason discovers a world that is anything but a world of Kissingeresque realpolitik enacted in boys' games on a frozen lake; of "nightcreeping" through the summer backyards of strangers; of the cruel, luscious Dawn Madden and her power-hungry boyfriend; of a certain Madame Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, an elderly bohemian emigre; of first cigarettes, first kisses, first Duran Duran LPs, and first deaths; of Margaret Thatcher's recession; of Gypsies camping in the woods and the hysteria they inspire; and, even closer to home, of a slow-motion divorce in four seasons. THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET "Mitchell's masterpiece; and also, I am convinced, a masterpiece of our time."--Richard Eder, "The Boston Globe" The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the Japanese Empire's single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay. To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, and costly courtesans comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiancee back in Holland. But Jacob's original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured midwife to the city's powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken--the consequences of which will extend beyond Jacob's worst imaginings.

Korean edition of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Six interlocking stories about fate told by six narrators. It is a BBC all time 100. Vol 1 of 2. In Korean. Annotation copyright Tsai Fong Books, Inc. Distributed by Tsai Fong Books, Inc.

A short story for the new year by David Mitchell, written specially for the Financial Times.

Korean edition of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Six interlocking stories about fate told by six narrators. It is a BBC all time 100. Vol 2 of 2. In Korean. Annotation copyright Tsai Fong Books, Inc. Distributed by Tsai Fong Books, Inc.

The design duo Kai & Sunny created the covers for David Mitchell's novels Cloud Atlas and Number 9 Dream. He has repaid them by writing a short story to accompany their latest exhibition, The Flower Show.

Character Development, an unnerving short story about an army private's intractable moral dilemma, is David Mitchell's contribution to the Amnesty International anthology, Freedom, marking 60 years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Hoe en waarom werkt fictie? Wat gebeurt er als een schrijver ervoor zorgt dat echte mensen in onze gedeelde echte wereld zich bekommeren om niet-bestaande mensen in een verzonnen wereld? Sprekend vanuit de Tower of Story, het ruigere bijgebouw van Leonard Cohens Tower of Song, deelt David Mitchell zijn gedachten over de theorie en praktijk van zijn leven als een professionele fantast.Coreferent Ionica Smeets vraagt zich af of de Tower of Science iets zou kunnen leren van de Tower of Story. ‘Verhalen kunnen prima zonder feiten, maar feiten kunnen niet zonder verhalen,’ is één van haar conclusies.42e Van der Leeuw-lezing 2024De Van der Leeuw-lezing is een jaarlijkse lezing in de Martinikerk in Groningen genoemd naar godsdienstwetenschapper en politicus Gerardus van der Leeuw. De lezing wordt sinds 1983 georganiseerd.

A short story also published in "The Book of Other People" edited by Zadie Smith.

ASIA'S PLACE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE: Stories set in Asia take a curiously big share of top literary prizes. Why? Asia haunts the European imagination, claims David Mitchell, a regular short-listee for the Man Booker Prize. Also in this issue: essays from Paul Vincent and Paul French; new writing from Roseanne Thong, Wes Stevens, Pico Iyer, Joshua Samuel Brown, Peter Wollman, Aditi Malik, Laura Ros, Orman Day; and poetry from Ha Kiet Chau, Alfred A. Yuson, Gilbert Koh, Kate Rodgers, Dipka Mukerjee, Jennifer Wong. DIMSUM, a thrice-yearly publication of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, celebrates new writing with an Asian flavour.

One of the author's short stories which form part of his uber novel, featuring Clive Pike who appeared in Black Swan Green. You can find it online

David mitchell collections cloud atlas, bone clocks and ghostwritten 3 books collection set Cloud Six interlocking lives - one amazing adventure. In a narrative that circles the globe and reaches from the 19th century to a post-apocalyptic future, Cloud Atlas erases the boundaries of time, genre and language to offer an enthralling vision of humanity's will to power, and where it will lead us., The Bone Run away, one drowsy summer's afternoon, with Holly wayward teenager, broken-hearted rebel and unwitting pawn in a titanic, hidden conflict. Over six decades, the consequences of a moment's impulse unfold, drawing an ordinary woman into a world far beyond her imagining. And as life in the near future turns perilous, the pledge she made to a stranger may become the key to her family's survival . . ., A magnificent achievement and an engrossing experience, David Mitchell's first novel announced the arrival of one of the most exciting writers of the twenty-first century. An apocalyptic cult member carries out a gas attack on a rush-hour metro, but what links him to a jazz buff in downtown Tokyo? Or to a Mongolian gangster, a woman on a holy mountain who talks to a tree, and a late night New York DJ?

David Mitchell Collection 3 Books Bundle includes Titles in this Collection :- Cloud Atlas,Ghostwritten, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet In your hands is a place like no a tiny, man-made island in the bay of Nagasaki, for two hundred years the sole gateway between Japan and the West. Here, in the dying days of the 18th century, a young Dutch clerk arrives to make his fortune. Instead he loses his heart.Step onto the streets of Dejima and mingle with scheming traders, spies, interpreters, servants and concubines as two cultures converge. In a tale of integrity and corruption, passion and power, the key is control - of riches and minds, and over death itself. Ghostwritten An apocalyptic cult member carries out a gas attack on a rush-hour metro, but what links him to a jazz buff in downtown Tokyo? Or to a Mongolian gangster, a woman on a holy mountain who talks to a tree, and a late night New York DJ? Set at the fugitive edges of Asia and Europe, Ghostwritten weaves together a host of characters, their interconnected destinies determined by the inescapable forces of cause and effect. Cloud Atlas Six interlocking lives - one amazing adventure. In a narrative that circles the globe and reaches from the 19th century to a post-apocalyptic future, Cloud Atlas erases the boundaries of time, genre and language to offer an enthralling vision of humanity's will to power, and where it will lead us.

This book is part of an art initiative conceived by Scottish artist Katie Paterson, who, along with top publishers and editors, will choose one renowned writer to contribute a new story each year to the Future Library. The art initiative is a literary time capsule, with a plan for 100 authors to submit 100 original works over the next 100 years. The material will remain unpublished and unread until 2114, held in trust in a special room of the new Deichman Library in Oslo.Mitchell's work is the second, after Margaret Atwood's "Scribbler Moon".