One Morning Like a Bird

Description

Tokyo, 1940. While Japan's war against China escalates, young Yuji Takano clings to his cocooned life: his beloved evenings of French conversation at Monsieur Feneon's, visits to the bathhouse with friends, his books, his poetry. But conscription looms and the mood turns against foreigners, just when Yuji gets entangled with Feneon's daughter. As the nation heads towards conflict with the Allies, Yuji must decide where his duty - and his heart - lie.

Andrew Miller's first novel, Ingenious Pain, was published by Sceptre in 1997 and greeted as the debut of an outstanding new writer. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Grinzane Cavour Prize for the best foreign novel published in Italy. It was followed by Casanova, then Oxygen, which was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award in 2001, The Optimists, and One Morning Like A Bird. In 2011, his sixth novel, Pure, was published to great acclaim and went on to win the Costa Book of the Year Award. Andrew Miller's novels have been translated into thirty languages. Born in Bristol in 1960, he has lived in Spain, Japan, France and Ireland, and currently lives in Somerset.

[Yuji] is a character so well realised as to engage all of our sympathies - Peter Carty, Independent A revelatory perspective on an Eastern city in the second world war . . .The prose is as delicate as a Japanese print - David Grylls, Sunday Times Not only does he combine delicious literary conceits with thought-provoking explorations into the human condition, he has the rare gift of tossing out perfect sentences that make you stop in your tracks - Claire Allfree, Metro Miller's delicate prose most closely recalls the tone of emotional restraint in Kazuo Ishiguro's early novels . . . Crisply defined characters offer a foil to Yuji's progressive ruminations, which Miller deftly coheres into a typically bittersweet resolution. - James Urquhart, Independent on Sunday The frank simplicity of Miller's prose, and his search for truth in the reality of the quotidian feels (to this Western reader) convincingly Japanese. Miller places his words and plot developments carefully, like the smooth grey pebbles of a Zen garden, with all but the most essential adjectives weathered away. There are moments of beauty, truth and irony. - Helen Brown, Daily Telegraph Deeply moving, written with loving attention to language, it felt like Pasternak back from the dead. - Tom Adair, Scotsman 'Detail by delicate detail Miller conjures Yuji's dim, mysterious world of gradual dissolution." - Natalie Sandison, The Times Miller's Japanese characters are densely believable, and his recreation of their world is a real achievement - Christopher Tayler, Guardian