Black Swan Green

Description

The dazzling novel from critically-acclaimed David Mitchell. Shortlisted for the 2006 Costa Novel Award Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2006 January, 1982. Thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor - covert stammerer and reluctant poet - anticipates a stultifying year in his backwater English village. But he hasn't reckoned with bullies, simmering family discord, the Falklands War, a threatened gypsy invasion and those mysterious entities known as girls. Charting thirteen months in the black hole between childhood and adolescence, this is a captivating novel, wry, painful and vibrant with the stuff of life.

David Mitchell's first novel, GHOSTWRITTEN, was awarded the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His second novel, NUMBER9DREAM, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 2003, David Mitchell was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists and his third novel, CLOUD ATLAS, was shortlisted forsix awardsincludingthe Man Booker Prize and won the British Book Awards Best Literary Fiction and South Bank Show Literature Prize. Born in 1969, he grew up in Worcestershire, and now lives in Ireland with his wife and two children.

'David Mitchell is dizzyingly, dazzlingly good!BLACK SWAN GREENis just gorgeous.' -- Daily Mail 'A delight to read from beginning to end' -- Sunday Express 'Luminously beautiful' -- The Times 'I do hope to read a better British novel this year, but I can't honestly say that I expect to.' -- David Robertson, Scotsman 'Mitchell is just about the best writer operating in Britain today...a novel that, like each of its predecessors, sticks in the back of your head for weeks after you've finished it.' -- Arena 'Spry, disconcerting and moving. It is also extremely funny even - or especially - at the blackest of moments.' -- Kate Kellaway, Observer Summer Reads 'Intricate and beautiful' -- Time Out 'Hugely touching and enjoyable' -- Rachel Cooke, Observer Summer Reads 'It is the best kind of contemporary fiction' -- Times Literary Supplement 'Rich and strange' -- Guardian 'That very rare thing, a realistic first novel written by a master of his craft.' -- Christina Patterson, Independent 'All the drama and inadvertent comedy of the onset of adolescence are brilliantly laid bare!a deceptively easy read, at times uproariously funny' -- Evening Standard