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Black Swan Green

About the Book

From award-winning writer David Mitchell comes a sinewy, meditative novel of boyhood on the cusp of adulthood and the old on the cusp of the new.

Black Swan tracks a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the thirteen chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy. A world of Kissingeresque realpolitik enacted in boys’ games on a frozen lake; of “nightcreeping” through the summer backyards of strangers; of the tabloid-fueled thrills of the Falklands War and its human toll; of the cruel, luscious Dawn Madden and her power-hungry boyfriend, Ross Wilcox; of a certain Madame Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, an elderly bohemian emigré who is both more and less than she appears; of Jason’s search to replace his dead grandfather’s irreplaceable smashed watch before the crime is discovered; of first cigarettes, first kisses, first Duran Duran Lps, and first deaths; of Margaret Thatcher’s recession; of Gypsies camping in the woods and the hysteria they inspire; and, even closer to home, of a slow-motion divorce in four seasons.

Pointed, funny, profound, left-field, elegiac, and painted with the stuff of life, Black Swan Green is David Mitchell’s subtlest and most effective achievement to date.

Praise:

“Mitchell set himself a different sort of challenge in his brilliant new novel, Black Swan Green. . . . In Jason, Mitchell creates an evocative yet authentically adolescent voice, an achievement even more impressive than the ventriloquism of his earlier books.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“This book is so entertainingly strange, so packed with activity, adventures, and diverting banter, that you only realize as the extraordinary novel concludes that the timid boy has grown before your eyes into a capable young man.”
—Entertainment Weekly 

“In Black Swan Green, the most prodigiously daring and imaginative young writer in Britain brings his formidable gifts very close to home. . . . He’s shown us dazzling power before; here he wins us with vulnerability.” —Time

“Led by one of the most endearing, smart, and funny young narrators ever to rise up from the pages of a novel, we move from Jason’s idiosyncratic, exclusive viewpoint to universal truths. The always fresh and brilliant writing will carry readers back to their own childhoods. . . . This enchanting novel makes us remember exactly what it was like.” |—The Boston Globe

“An unapologetically realist novel and a hugely satisfying one.”
—BaltimoreSun

“Black Swan Green is the funniest novel of adolescence since Catcher in the Rye, or the most painful portrait of boyish aggression since Lord of the Flies, or the most inventive depiction of teenage language since A Clockwork Orange, or the most nuanced account of the loss of innocence since Le Grand Meaulnes.”
—The New Republic

“Mitchell mesmerizes with flat-out brilliant vignettes of the quotidian.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune

“Black Swan Green proves that Mitchell’s talent lies not only in sweeping story lines and complicated plot structures. He also succeeds in infusing a simple coming-of-age story with his own brand of creative flair, his trademark gorgeous language and his pitch-perfect dialogue. Black Swan Green is powerful and beautifully rendered.”
—Rocky Mountain News

“This is one lovable kid and one dream-read of a book.”
—The Seattle Times

 ”Mitchell’s verbal economy and fine ear for dialect give his Everyboy an inimitable voice.”
—New York

“Cloud Atlas was an audacious display of talent, but with this straightforward tale of a stammering, Tolkien-loving kid’s adolescence in Thatcher-era England, Mitchell proves that he doesn’t need structural gimmicks to dazzle readers. His ability to exuberantly capture the joys of boyhood more than suffices.”
—Details

“A cheeky novel . . . charged with the energy of adolescence.”
—Chicago Tribune

“David Mitchell is one of those writers who seem to have sprung, fully developed, from the forehead of some god of Art. . . . The characters are wonderful—sympathetic, funny, perfectly drawn. The memories of childhood on the cusp of adolescence are poignant, compelling. Best of all is the sensory-soaked
writing.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“This poetry of childhood, with its ebullient visions and dark passages, is the focus of David Mitchell’s thoughtful and captivating new novel, Black Swan Green.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“David Mitchell is probably the most exciting English novelist at work today. . . . Black Swan Green is a delight to read—deft, playful, perceptive.”
—The New York Observer

“A novel that’s alternately nostalgic, funny and heartbreaking.”
—The Washington Post 

“A dark, intimate novel that remembers teenage humiliation—and Thatcherite Britain.”
—Salon.com

“This is a luminously beautiful book. It celebrates the liberating power of language while reviewing without bitterness or resentment the role that inarticulacy, shyness, even bullying, might play in shaping the future career of a writer.”
—The Times (London)

“Perfectly captures the terrors and the shrill thrills of being a 13-year-old.”
—The Scotsman

 ”David Mitchell [is] one of the most brilliantly inventive writers of this, or any, country. His Black Swan Green is another virtuoso feat.”
—The Independent (London)

“Mitchell has written another complex novel, in which multiple themes run like streams of extra data beneath every incident, and understanding comes by the process of reading into a satisfying tangle of metaphor and reference. It is the best kind of contemporary fiction.”
—Times Literary Supplement (London)

“The world Mitchell conjures is vivid and brilliantly re-imagined.”
—The Spectator (London)

“While many young writers are turning away from the ambitions of their postmodern forebears, Mitchell has found a new path, with a novel as alive to the complex operations of culture as it is to the old-fashioned satisfactions of character.”
—The Week (London)

“The closer you read Black Swan Green, indeed, the more rich and strange it becomes.”
—The Guardian (London)

“Great Britain’s Catcher in the Rye—and another triumph for one of the present age’s most interesting and accomplished novelists.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[A] beautiful, stripped-down coming-of-age story.”
—Booklist (starred review)

“Captures the sheer pleasure of being a boy and brings to mind adventures shared by Huck and Tom.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“David Mitchell continues to surprise me with his virtuosity and humanity. Black Swan Green is his most accomplished and accessible book to date. If you read one British novel this year, please make it this one.”
—Gary Shteyngart, author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan

“Mitchell is one of our great writers; you sit wide-eyed in your armchair, amazed at what he can do. With Black Swan Green, he’s quietly conjured an imp: that sense, in boyhood, of ordinary life about to become an adventure.”
—Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli

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