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.

Praise:

“[David Mitchell] performs a feat of seamless literary ventriloquism by utterly, and uncannily, inhabiting and anatomizing another culture. With his kaleidoscopic eyes affixed to the pulse of modern Japan, Mitchell writes like a dream, the kind you don’t want to end.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Funny, tender-hearted and horrifying, often all at once, [Number9Dream] refashions the rudiments of the coming-of-age novel into something completely original.”
—Newsweek

“Mitchell’s new novel has been described as a cross between Don DeLillo and William Gibson, and although that’s a perfectly serviceable cocktail-party formula, it doesn’t do justice to this odd, fitfully compelling work.”
—The New Yorker

“Leaping with ease from surrealist fables to a teenage coming-of-age story and then spinning back to Yakuza gangster battles and World War II–era kamikaze diaries, Mitchell is an aerial freestyle ski-jumper of fiction. Somehow, after performing feats of literary gymnastics, he manages to stick the landing.”
—The Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Mitchell’s stunning second novel is many things, all of them wonderful: a literary tale that plumbs Raymond Chandler, an exploration of the urban mindscape, a wide-eyed look at the world that’s not afraid to ask big questions. . . . Flexing his considerable stylistic muscle, he plays with form while hewing true to a tightly plotted tale that pulls you along, wondering where it will all end. . . . This is a terrific book.”
—Booklist (starred review)

“David Mitchell melds fantasy and reality, past and present and hopes lost and found into a story of a young man who searches for his father but who, instead, finds himself. . . . It is a trip that those who love serious literary fiction ought not to miss.”
—The Denver Post

David Mitchell’s electrifying debut novel takes readers on a mesmerizing trek across a world of human experience through a series of ingeniously linked narratives.

Oblivious to the bizarre ways in which their lives intersect, nine characters-a terrorist in Okinawa, a record-shop clerk in Tokyo, a money-laundering British financier in Hong Kong, an old woman running a tea shack in China, a transmigrating “noncorpum” entity seeking a human host in Mongolia, a gallery-attendant-cum-art-thief in Petersburg, a drummer in London, a female physicist in Ireland, and a radio deejay in New York-hurtle toward a shared destiny of astonishing impact. Like the book’s one non-human narrator, Mitchell latches onto his host characters and invades their lives with parasitic precision, making Ghostwritten a sprawling and brilliant literary relief map of the modern world.

Praise:

"Mitchell… has a gift for fiction’s natural pleasures–intricate surprises, insidiously woven narratives, ingenious voices… "
–The New York Times Book Review

"Elegantly composed, gracefully plotted and full of humor."
–Los Angeles Times

"A brave new book for a brave new world–fueled by a brilliant imagination and buoyed by beautifully descriptive writing."
–USA Today

"[Mitchell] has a gift for fiction’s natural pleasures–intricate surprises, insidiously woven narratives, ingenious voices."
–The New York Times Book Review

"Unlike so many of the chroniclers of the 21st-century pastiche-an industry dominated by ad men and feature-writers, not novelists-Mitchell has set out to craft actual characters, not archetypes. The result is a dazzling piece of work."
–The Washington Post

"Mitchell is a sly, inventive storyteller–and anything but predictable… Inventive and mind-provoking."
–Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

"Ghostwritten is also elegantly composed, gracefully plotted and full of humor… [It] recall[s] Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in its emotional scope and its ambitions. Like the great Russians, Mitchell makes us feel that more is at stake than individual lives, although it’s by individual lives that pain and loss are measured."
–Los Angeles Times

"Mitchell deftly sketches each character to such a compelling extent that you become totally immersed… His nine characters and their random but fateful interactions provide a playful, suspenseful foray into our ever-shrinking world."
–Entertainment Weekly

"Nine tales set in nine countries are intricately woven together in this impressive debut novel."
–Talk

"An intricately assembled Faberge egg of a novel, full of sly and sometimes beautiful surprises… In an era in which much literary fiction is characterized by unearned ironies and glib cynicism, it’s hard not to be impressed by the humanism that animates Mitchell’s book… Worth a dozen of the morally anorexic novels that regularly come down the pipe."
–New York

"Gripping and innovative… [Ghostwritten] serve[s] to illustrate the strange interconnectivity of the modern world and the improvisatory nature of fate."
–The New York Times

"Mitchell has written a testament to just how far a little nerve, a lot of talent, and an airplane will take you… A novel that wends from Okinawa to Mongolia to Petersburg, as well as visiting the more traditional literary haunts of London and New York, has to be commended for its geographical audacity alone."
–The Philadelphia Inquirer

"A daring novel, uniquely structured and just as uniquely compelling."
–The Denver Post

"Ghostwritten is a marvelous puzzle. It takes time to figure together the disparate pieces, but patience in this case pays off handsomely. Once assembled, the story hums with significance… [An] amazing first novel."
–The New York Observer

"David Mitchell’s first novel is a firework display… The assurance and panache are truly remarkable… This is a remarkable novel by a young writer of remarkable talent."
–The Observer (London)

"[Mitchell's] detail boasts the quiet and proud precision which makes his Englishness no surprise."
–The Seattle Times

"This is one of the best first novels I’ve read for a long time… I read a proof of this on a transatlantic flight. When I got off in Atlanta, I couldn’t put it down. I pulled my luggage in one hand along corridors and escalators, and held David Mitchell’s last chapter up to my nose with the other. I finished at the carousel. It seemed appropriate. And it’s even better the second time."
–A. S. Byatt

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.

Praise:

“[Mitchell’s] exuberant, Nabokovian delight in word play; his provocative grapplings with the great unknowables; and most of all his masterful storytelling: All coalesce to make Cloud Atlas an exciting, almost overwhelming masterpiece.”
—The Washington Times

“[Mitchell’s] language crackles with texture and bite.”
—Time

“Hugely entertaining . . . a surfeit of narrative ingenuity.”
—The New York Observer

“Mitchell’s talent for riotous incident and energetic prose keep the pages turning.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“[Mitchell’s] most audacious work . . . a wild, wonderful ride.”
—Newsweek

“[Cloud Atlas] glows with a fizzy, dizzy energy, pregnant with possibility and whispering in your ear: Listen closely to a story, any story, and you’ll hear another story inside it, eager to meet the world.”
—The Village Voice

“Exhilarating, elegant, and accomplished . . . Cloud Atlas is a narrative about the act of narration, the ability of storytelling to shape our sense of history, civilization, and selfhood.”
—Time Out New York

“Mitchell has a gift for creating fully realized worlds with a varied cast of characters.”
—Library Journal

 ”[Like] Haruki Murakami, Mitchell mixes highbrow concerns with pulp content for maximum reading pleasure.”
—Details

“Cloud Atlas is such an astounding feat that it’s tempting to think there must be several David Mitchells, each of whom wrote one part of this book.”
—BookPage

“Stunning . . . Mitchell has a gift with language. [His] exploration of power and greed is riveting.”
—Rocky Mountain News

“Audacious, sprawling, preposterously ambitious . . . Next time someone suggests that The Novel is endangered, hit him with this one. Hard.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune

“Revolutionary . . . Cloud Atlas brilliantly puzzles out the way things might not have been.”
—Newsday

“Astonishing . . . The way Mitchell inhabits the different voices is close to miraculous.”
—The Sunday Times (London)

“A remarkable book . . . It knits together science fiction, political thriller and historical pastiche with musical virtuosity and linguistic exuberance.”
—Evening Standard (London)

“A cornucopia, an elegiac, radiant festival of prescience, meditation, and entertainment. Open up Mitchell’s head and a whole ecstatic symphony of inventiveness and ideas will fly out as if from a benign and felicitious Pandora’s box.”
—The Times (London)

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

Reader’s Guide | Teacher’s Guide

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 fiancée 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.

Praise:

"Very few people can write novels as ambitious and crowd-pleasing as David Mitchell’s. In what might be his boldest book yet, the author of Cloud Atlas delivers a historical epic about a Dutch accountant’s adventures in feudal Japan."
— Details magazine

"The most consistently interesting novelist of his generation goes back to 1790s Japan, when the Dutch East India Company was Tokyo’s only contact point with the Western world."
— Time magazine

"Those looking for the summer’s big historical novel, look no further: The two-time Booker Award finalist has delivered the tale of a young clerk with the Dutch East Indies Company who, in 1799, is posted to a man-made island in Nagasaki Harbor. Political intrigue and cross-cultural romance ensue."
— Newsday

"When a Dutch trader falls in love with a Japanese midwife who is also the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor in 19th-century Japan, you can be sure that the emotional and cultural clashes will be significant. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a historical romance novel by David Mitchell, gifted author of Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green. Here, Mitchell melds history and literature into a satisfying blend."
— Christian Science Monitor

“Mitchell’s rightly been hailed as a virtuoso genius for his genre-bending, fiercely intelligent novels …The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a dense and satisfying historical with literary brawn and stylistic panache. “
—Publishers Weekly, starred review & Pick of the Week 

"It is a rare novel that’s so captivating that the reader feels transported through time and fully immersed in an unfamiliar culture and place, and this is such a novel. . . .This painstakingly researched and original novel is hard to pin to any one genre, for it is a historical novel and cultural study with plenty of intrigue and mystery mixed in. It is intelligent and utterly readable at the same time."
—Library Journal, Starred Review

“It’s as difficult to put this novel down as it is to overestimate Mitchell’s virtually unparalleled mastery of dramatic construction, illuminating characterizations and insight into historical conflict and change. Comparisons to Tolstoy are inevitable, and right on the money.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Despite the audacious scope, the focus remains intimate; each fascinating character has the opportunity to share his or her story. Everything is patched together seamlessly and interwoven with clever wordplay and enlightening historical details on feudal Japan. First-rate literary fiction and a rousing good yarn, too.”
—Booklist, starred review

“Spectacularly accomplished and thrillingly suspenseful…a narrative of panoramic span…With this book, he masterfully extends his reach and deepens his concerns…Prodigiously researched, it resurrects place and period with riveting immediacy. Imagining, with corresponding fullness, not just its characters’ present predicaments but their pasts and futures, it brims with rich, involving and affecting humanity.”
—Sunday Times

“The books of David Mitchell represent something akin to a Holy Grail for the publishing industry: not only is he a literary novelist who enjoys commercial success, he is an experimental writer whose works appeal equally to prize judges (he has been shortlisted for the Booker ) and the Richard & Judy selectors. His new novel, may not have the nostalgic charm of Black Swan Green, the matryoshka structure of Cloud Atlas or the alternate realities and fantasies in number9dream, but it has a sophistication and depth that leads me to suspect we’ve only glimpsed the author’s potential so far. The novel makes clear that what was exhilarating about Mitchell’s earlier work wasn’t the playful architectures or the dalliances with sci-fi; it was the exhilaration of the language itself…The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is far more subtle than just a tale of culture clashes, forbidden love and unexpected bravery.  For a tour de force, it’s surprisingly nimble, emotionally complex and simply unforgettable.”
—Scotland on Sunday

“A master-piece…It’s this kind of free-flowing descriptiveness, this sheer revelry in language, this fascination with what it can and can’t explain, that underpins an already fascinating story. So credible has Mitchell made this mélange of love story, quest, myth, melodrama and historical fiction that you’ll probably finish it, as I did, and straight away check out what bits were true to the historical record, which facts were bent and which dates massaged. Then you’ll realise that none of this matters, because masterpieces make their own rules, and this book is definitely one of them.”
—Scotsman

“Every sentence yields glorious surprises that no one else could think up.  In a novel where the challenge of communication is paramount, dialogue dominates, shifting masterfully between bawdy dialects, halting translations and secret inner thoughts…These few hundred words can only hint at the complexity and eloquence of this novel.  It will doubtless earn Mitchell his fourth Booker nomination and, if there us any justice, his first win.”
—Sunday Telegraph

“There is no retreat, here, into the conventions of historical fiction.  All Mitchell’s architectural wizardry and verbal intensity are at play – but now subordinated solely into the service of his subject matter…I doubt there is another living English writer who is capable of such traversals of worlds and consciousness…Here, in this recreation of a historical moment, his transmigrations of empathy become fully emotionally satisfying…a marvel – entirely original among contemporary British novels, revealing its author as, surely, the most impressive fictional mind of his generation.”
—Observer

“The book leaves a reader, as Ghostwritten did, in a space beyond "belief or disbelief", citizen of several worlds but tyrant or serf in none, only convinced, as its voice of truth says, that it is "Better to strive to co-exist, than seek to disprove"…However densely charted and richly sketched, this sumptuous imbroglio never drags. Its author often risks high-level pastiche but writes with such invigorating edge and dash that scarcely a sentence stands idle…More than before, those muscles do the heart’s work.”
—Independent

“Extraordinarily entertaining and well-realised… His writing just gives intense pleasure."
– AS Byatt in The Guardian

"How on earth does [Mitchell] do it? He can write as thrillingly about large-scale events as he can about the tiny details of the private world. Such fluent and masterful command of both domains seems the stuff of a true artist’s gifts, not the laborious work of craft and toil. Not the least astonishing facet of Mitchell’s art is the supple effortlessness he brings to creating worlds entire: worlds so credible and fully formed that one is compelled to allow to pass through one’s mind the absurd thought he was, perhaps, an inhabitant of Japan in 1799. What Adam Thirlwell has provocatively said about Tolstoy as a miniaturist applies equally to Mitchell…This novel is a thriller with a glittering seam of a love story running through it (or is it the other way round?). . . it is a sumptuous historical novel on the collision of cultures . . . The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet  is vertiginously ambitious – and brilliant.”
—The Times (London)

“This is probably Mitchell’s most accessible book. It runs to almost 500 pages, yet almost every sentence shimmers with precise, opaque and brilliantly realised writing. . . An historical saga on a deliberately grand scale, it never loses its quiet intimacy and is a brilliantly realised account of two worlds.”
—The Irish Times

“Mitchell has built a reputation as just about the most audacious, thrilling and, above all, entertaining young British novelist there is. He’s that genuine rarity, a writer of startling ambition whose work is challenging and unconventional, yet whose storytelling gifts keep you turning the page…. [The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet] may just be Mitchell’s most ambitious book yet. . . . [he is] the magician of modern fiction.”
—The Guardian

Set in atmospheric coastal Japan, this epic story centers on an earnest young clerk, Jacob de Zoet, who arrives in the summer of 1799 to make his fortune and return to Holland to wed his fiancée. But Jacob’s plans are shaken when he meets the daughter of a Samurai.