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The Sunday Times Number One Bestseller, from the author of CLOUD ATLAS and THE BONE CLOCKS.
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010
‘Brilliant’ – The Times
‘A masterpiece’ – Scotsman
Be transported to a place like no other: 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.
‘Confirms Mitchell as one of the more fascinating and fearless writers alive’ – New York Times Book Review
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010
‘Brilliant’ – The Times
‘A masterpiece’ – Scotsman
Be transported to a place like no other: 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.
‘Confirms Mitchell as one of the more fascinating and fearless writers alive’ – New York Times Book Review
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Reviews
Lose yourself in a world of incredible scope, originality and imaginative brilliance.
A novel which actually deserves the accolade "tour de force".
Spectacularly accomplished and thrillingly suspenseful.
The most impressive fictional mind of his generation.
Confirms Mitchell as one of the more fascinating and fearless writers alive.
Compared with almost everything being written now, it is vertiginously ambitious - and brilliant
A world of stories in prose that brings a lump to the throat . . . David Mitchell has done it again
Arguably his finest . . . It will doubtless earn Mitchell his fourth Man Booker nomination and, if there's any justice, his first win.
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.
Moving, thoughtful and unexpectedly funny
Hugely enjoyable . . . the descriptions of Dejima and what life there must have been like are extraordinarily accurate
A masterpiece
David Mitchell is back with a bang . . . superb
Ambitious and fascinating . . . Comparisons to Tolstoy are inevitable, and right on the money.
Pitch-perfect