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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

On sale

13th May 2010

Price: £19.99

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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…

Reviews

BLACK SWAN GREEN
Praise for
<i> Daily Mail </i>
'David Mitchell is dizzyingly, dazzlingly good...BLACK SWAN GREEN is just gorgeous.'
<i> Sunday Express </i>
'A delight to read from beginning to end'
<i> The Times </i>
'Luminously beautiful'
<i> Arena </i>
'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.'
Katy Guest, Independent on Sunday
Lose yourself in a world of incredible scope, originality and imaginative brilliance.
Kamila Shamsie, Books of the Year, Daily Telegraph
A novel which actually deserves the accolade "tour de force".
<i>Sunday Times</i>
Spectacularly accomplished and thrillingly suspenseful.
<i>Observer</i>
The most impressive fictional mind of his generation.
Dave Eggers, <i>New York Times Book Review</i>
Confirms Mitchell as one of the more fascinating and fearless writers alive.
The Times
Compared with almost everything being written now, it is vertiginously ambitious - and brilliant
Independent on Sunday
A world of stories in prose that brings a lump to the throat . . . David Mitchell has done it again
Sunday Telegraph
Arguably his finest . . . It will doubtless earn Mitchell his fourth Man Booker nomination and, if there's any justice, his first win.
Independent
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.
Observer, Books of the Year
Moving, thoughtful and unexpectedly funny
Literary Review
Hugely enjoyable . . . the descriptions of Dejima and what life there must have been like are extraordinarily accurate
Scotsman
A masterpiece
Irish Independent
David Mitchell is back with a bang . . . superb
Kirkus Reviews
Ambitious and fascinating . . . Comparisons to Tolstoy are inevitable, and right on the money.
Independent Books of the Year
Pitch-perfect