LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
Shortlisted for the Independent Booksellers Book Award 2011.
Shortlisted for the Galaxy UK Author of the Year 2010.
Good historical fiction - which is what this book is - requires a careful balance of imagination and historical research. Imagination to help the reader feel part of the story and research to make it feel true. In this book, we are transported back to the conflicting cultures of the Dutch East Indies Company and a Japan of 200 years ago when time followed a different clock. It was a time when life was raw, unforgiving and gory. A dog-eat-dog world where trust was rare and love rarer still. This is a truly original, imaginative and challenging historical novel.
And why not become one of a Thousand Exclusive reviewers of the book - see David's facebook page to find out more....
LoveReading
Find This Book In
About
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet Synopsis
THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER David Mitchell's novels have captivated critics and readers alike, as his Man Booker shortlistings and Richard & Judy Book of the Year award attest. Now he has written a masterpiece. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is the kind of book that comes along once in a decade -- enthralling in its storytelling, imagination and scope. Set at a turning point in history on a tiny island attached to mainland Japan, David Mitchell's tale of power, passion and integrity transports us to a world that is at once exotic and familiar: an extraordinary place and an era when news from abroad took months to arrive, yet when people behaved as they always do - loving, lusting and yearning, cheating, fighting and killing. Bringing to vivid life a tectonic shift between East and West, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is dramatic, funny, heartbreaking, enlightening and thought-provoking. Reading it is an unforgettable experience.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9780340921586 |
| Publication date: |
17th March 2011 |
| Author: |
David Mitchell |
| Publisher: |
Sceptre an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton General Division |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
560 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Modern and Contemporary Fiction
|
| Other Genres: |
|
| Recommendations: |
|
Press Reviews
David Mitchell Press Reviews
'Compared with almost everything being written now, it is vertiginously ambitious -- and brilliant...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'
The Times
'Unquestionably a marvel -- entirely original among contemporary British novels, revealing its author as, surely, the most impressive fictional mind of his generation'
Observer
'Mitchell gives us a world of stories in prose that brings a lump to the throat...dive in and lose yourself in a world of incredible scope, originality and imaginative brilliance. David Mitchell has done it again.'
Independent on Sunday
'Spectacularly accomplished and thrillingly suspenseful...it brims with rich, involving and affecting humanity.'
Sunday Times
'Arguably his finest...Every sentence yields glorious surprises that no one else could think up...It will doubtless earn Mitchell his fourth Man Booker nomination and, if there's any justice, his first win.'
Sunday Telegraph
'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.'
Independent
'Hugely enjoyable...the descriptions of Dejima and what life there must have been like are extraordinarily accurate'
Literary Review
'David Mitchell is back with a bang...superb'
Irish Independent
'For a tour de force, it's surprisingly nimble, emotionally complex and simply unforgettable.'
Scotland on Sunday
'Ambitious and fascinating...Comparisons to Tolstoy are inevitable, and right on the money.'
Kirkus Reviews
'A masterpiece'
Scotsman
Author
About David Mitchell
Born in 1969, David Mitchell grew up in Worcestershire. After graduating from Kent University, he taught English in Japan, where he wrote his first novel, Ghostwritten. Published in 1999, it was awarded the Mail on Sunday John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His second novel, number9dream, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and in 2003, David Mitchell was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. His third novel, Cloud Atlas, was shortlisted for six awards including the Man Booker Prize, and adapted for film in 2012. It was followed by Black Swan Green, shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year Award, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which was a No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller. Both were also longlisted for the Booker. In 2013, The Reason I Jump: One Boy's Voice From the Silence of Autism by Naoki Higashida was published in a translation from the Japanese by David Mitchell and KA Yoshida. It was an immediate bestseller in the UK and later in the US as well.
Author photo © Paul Stuart
More About David Mitchell
