Standalone Novels In Publication Order
- Ghostwritten (1999)
- Number9Dream (2001)
- Cloud Atlas (2004)
- Black Swan Green (2006)
- The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010)
- The Bone Clocks (2014)
- Slade House (2015)
- Utopia Avenue (2020)
Anthologies In Publication Order
- I’m With the Bears (2011)
Standalone Novels Book Covers
Anthologies Book Covers
David Mitchell Books Overview
Ghostwritten
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 of a writer of astonishing gifts.
Number9Dream
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 journey: 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. From the Hardcover edition.
Cloud Atlas
From David Mitchell, the Booker Prize nominee, award winning writer and one of the featured authors in Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 2003 issue, comes his highly anticipated third novel, a work of mind bending imagination and scope. A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between the wars Belgium; a high minded journalist in Governor Reagan s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified dinery server on death row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other s echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small. In his captivating third novel, David Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation on humanity s dangerous will to power, and where it may lead us.
Black Swan Green
From highly acclaimed two time Man Booker finalist David Mitchell comes a glorious, sinewy, meditative novel of boyhood on the cusp of adulthood and the old on the cusp of the new. In his previous novels, David Mitchell dazzled us with his narrative scope and his virtuosic command of multiple voices and stories. The New York Times Book Review said, Mitchell is, clearly, a genius. He writes as though at the helm of some perpetual dream machine, can evidently do anything, and his ambition is written in magma across Cloud Atlas’s every page. Black Swan Green inverts the telescopic vision of Cloud Atlas to track a single year in what is, for 13 year old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the 13 chapters create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy. Pointed, funny, profound, left field, elegiac, and painted with the stuff of life, Black Swan Green is David Mitchell s subtlest yet most accessible achievement to date. Excerpt from Black Swan Green:Picked on kids act invisible to reduce the chances of being noticed and picked on. Stammerers act invisible to reduce the chances of being made to say something we can t. Kids whose parents argue act invisible in case we trigger another skirmish. The Triple Invisible Boy, that s Jason Taylor. Even I don t see the real Jason Taylor much these days, cept for when we re writing a poem, or occasionally in a mirror, or just before sleep. But he comes out in woods. Ankley branches, knuckly roots, paths that only might be, earthworks by badgers or Romans, a pond that ll ice over come January, a wooden cigar box nailed behind the ear of a secret sycamore where we once planned a treehouse, birdstuffedtwigsnapped silence, toothy bracken, and places you can t find if you re not alone. Time in woods s older than time in clocks, and truer. From the Hardcover edition.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
In 2007, Time magazine named him one of the most influential novelists in the world. He has twice been short listed for the Man Booker Prize. The New York Times Book Review called him simply a genius. Now David Mitchell lends fresh credence to The Guardian’s claim that each of his books seems entirely different from that which preceded it. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a stunning departure for this brilliant, restless, and wildly ambitious author, a giant leap forward by even his own high standards. A bold and epic novel of a rarely visited point in history, it is a work as exquisitely rendered as it is irresistibly readable. The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the high walled, fan shaped artificial island that is the Japanese Empire s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay; the farthest outpost of the war ravaged Dutch East Indies Company; and a de facto prison for the dozen foreigners permitted to live and work there. To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, costly courtesans, earthquakes, and typhoons comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fianc e back in Holland. But Jacob s original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor and 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 will extend beyond Jacob s worst imaginings. As one cynical colleague asks, Who ain t a gambler in the glorious Orient, with his very life? A magnificent mix of luminous writing, prodigious research, and heedless imagination, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is the most impressive achievement of its eminent author.
I’m With the Bears
A stellar line up of fiction writers envision the terrors of impending climate change. The size and severity of the global climate crisis is such that even the most committed environmentalists are liable to live in a state of denial. The award winning writers collected here have made it their task to shake off this nagging disbelief, bringing the incomprehensible within our grasp and shaping an emotional response to the deterioration of our global habitat. From T. C. Boyle’s account of early eco activists, to Nathaniel Rich s vision of a near future where oil sells for $800 a barrel these ten provocative, occasionally chilling, sometimes satirical stories bring a human reality to disasters of inhuman proportions. Royalties from I m With the Bears will go to 350. org, an international grassroots movement working to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Related Authors
We were lent a copy of David N. Mitchell’s The Insiders Arizona Guidebook. Besides being useful & describing some out of the way places to visit, his prose was helpful and made us laugh out loud to his little quips. We will buy our own copy so we can explore other Arizona hidden treasures.