The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Description

The Sunday Times Number One Bestseller, from the author of CLOUD ATLAS and THE BONE CLOCKS. Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010 In your hands is a place like no other: a tiny, man-made island in the bay of Nagasaki, for two hundred years the sole gateway between Japan and the West. Here, in the dying days of the 18th century, a young Dutch clerk arrives to make his fortune. Instead he loses his heart. Step onto the streets of Dejima and mingle with scheming traders, spies, interpreters, servants and concubines as two cultures converge. In a tale of integrity and corruption, passion and power, the key is control - of riches and minds, and over death itself.

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. David Mitchell's sixth novel is The Bone Clocks (Sceptre, 2014).

Compared with almost everything being written now, it is vertiginously ambitious - and brilliant - 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 Arguably his finest . . . 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 Spectacularly accomplished and thrillingly suspenseful . . . a narrative of panoramic span. Mitchell fills his pages with a medley of accents, idioms and speech habits. Prodigiously researched, his book resurrects a place and period with riveting immediacy . . . it brims with rich, involving and affecting humanity - Sunday Times That rare thing - a novel which actually deserves the accolade "tour de force" - Daily Telegraph Books of the Year Moving, thoughtful and unexpectedly funny - Observer Books of the Year Hugely enjoyable . . . the descriptions of Dejima and what life there must have been like are extraordinarily accurate - Literary Review