Imagine an empire that has shut out the world for a century and a half. No one can leave, foreigners are excluded, their religions banned and their ideas deeply mistrusted. Yet a narrow window onto this nation-fortress still exists: an artificial walled island connected to a mainland port, and manned by a handful of European traders. And locked as the land-gate may be, it cannot prevent the meeting of minds – or hearts.

The nation was Japan, the port was Nagasaki and the island was Dejima, to where David Mitchell's panoramic novel transports us in the year 1799. For one Dutch clerk, Jacob de Zoet, a dark adventure of duplicity, love, guilt, faith and murder is about to begin – and all the while, unbeknownst to him and his feuding compatriots, the axis of global power is turning...

Reviews

'Ambitious and fascinating...Comparisons to Tolstoy are inevitable, and right on the money.'

Kirkus Reviews

'Compared with almost everything being written now, it is vertiginously ambitious – and brilliant...He can write as thrillingly about large-scale events as he can about the tiny details of the private world. Such fluent and masterful command of both domains seems the stuff of a true artist’s gifts'

The Times

'Spectacularly accomplished and thrillingly suspenseful...it brims with rich, involving and affecting humanity.'

Sunday Times

'A masterpiece'

Scotsman

'David Mitchell is back with a bang...superb'

Irish Independent

'Arguably his finest...Every sentence yields glorious surprises that no one else could think up...It will doubtless earn Mitchell his fourth Man Booker nomination and, if there’s any justice, his first win.'

Sunday Telegraph

'Unquestionably a marvel – entirely original among contemporary British novels, revealing its author as, surely, the most impressive fictional mind of his generation'

Observer

'However densely charted and richly sketched, this sumptuous imbroglio never drags...Mitchell flexes his prose virtuosity. More than before, those muscles do the heart's work.'

Independent

'Hugely enjoyable...the descriptions of Dejima and what life there must have been like are extraordinarily accurate'

Literary Review

'For a tour de force, it’s surprisingly nimble, emotionally complex and simply unforgettable.'

Scotland on Sunday

'Mitchell gives us a world of stories in prose that brings a lump to the throat...dive in and lose yourself in a world of incredible scope, originality and imaginative brilliance. David Mitchell has done it again.'

Independent on Sunday