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**Pre-order UTOPIA AVENUE, the spectacular new novel from David Mitchell.**
The Sunday Times Number One Bestseller, from the author of CLOUD ATLAS and THE BONE CLOCKS.
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010
Imagine a nation banishing the outside world for two centuries, crushing all vestiges of Christianity, forbidding its subjects to leave its shores on pain of death, and harbouring a deep mistrust of European ideas. The narrow window onto this nation-fortress is a walled, artificial island attached to the mainland port and manned by a handful of traders. Locked as the land-gate may be, however, 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 young Dutch clerk, Jacob de Zoet, a strage adventure of duplicity, love, guilt, faith and murder is about to begin – and all the while, unbeknownst to the men confined on Dejima, the axis of global power is turning…
The Sunday Times Number One Bestseller, from the author of CLOUD ATLAS and THE BONE CLOCKS.
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010
Imagine a nation banishing the outside world for two centuries, crushing all vestiges of Christianity, forbidding its subjects to leave its shores on pain of death, and harbouring a deep mistrust of European ideas. The narrow window onto this nation-fortress is a walled, artificial island attached to the mainland port and manned by a handful of traders. Locked as the land-gate may be, however, 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 young Dutch clerk, Jacob de Zoet, a strage adventure of duplicity, love, guilt, faith and murder is about to begin – and all the while, unbeknownst to the men confined on Dejima, the axis of global power is turning…
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Reviews
Praise for
'David Mitchell is dizzyingly, dazzlingly good...BLACK SWAN GREEN is just gorgeous.'
'A delight to read from beginning to end'
'Luminously beautiful'
'Mitchell is just about the best writer operating in Britain today...a novel that, like each of its predecessors, sticks in the back of your head for weeks after you've finished it.'
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