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Synopsis

By the author of the Mann Booker-shortlisted Cloud Atlas.

It's a dank January in the Worcestershire village of Black Swan Green and thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor - covert stammerer and reluctant poet - anticipates a stultifying year in the deadest village on Earth. But Jason hasn't reckoned with a junta of bullies, simmering family discord, the Falklands War, an exotic Belgian emigre, a threatened gypsy invasion and the caprices of those mysterious entities known as girls.

David Mitchell's bewitching new novel charts thirteen months in the black hole between childhood and adolescence, set against the sunset of an agrarian England still overshadowed by the Cold War. Wry, painful, funny and vibrant with the stuff of life, Black Swan Green is his subtlest and most captivating achievement to date.

Praise for David Mitchell

An author of extraordinary ambition and skill - Matt Thorne, Independent on Sunday

He possesses an amazingly copious and eclectic imagination - William Boyd, Books of the Year, Daily Telegraph

Mitchell has an absolutely classic authorial voice, very clear like clear glass, and doesn't advertise his own cleverness. - AS Byatt, Independent on Sunday

He is a wonderfully amphibious writer, happy in all manner of elements, and seems able to produce an endless parade of interesting characters. - Robert MacFarlane, Observer

Mitchell's touch is faultless - Peter Ingham, The Times

A thrilling and gifted writer, commanding an enormous breadth of language and erudition. - James Urquhart, Financial Times

About the Author

David Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten, was published in 1999, when it won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His second, Number9dream, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and in 2003 he was chosen as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. His third novel, Cloud Atlas, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the South Bank Show Literature Prize, and the Best Literary Fiction and the Richard & Judy Best Rad of the Year categories in the British Book Awards. It was shortlisted for a further six awards including the Man Booker Prize and the Commonwealth Writer's Prize.