‘ONE OF THE MOST BRILLIANTLY INVENTIVE WRITERS OF THIS, OR ANY, COUNTRY’ INDEPENDENT
Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and longlisted for the Booker Prize
‘Gorgeous’
DAILY MAIL
‘Uproariously funny’
EVENING STANDARD
‘Spellbinding’
TATLER
‘Brilliant’
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
‘Luminously beautiful’
THE TIMES
The Sunday Times bestselling fourth novel from the critically acclaimed author of Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas
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.
PRAISE FOR DAVID MITCHELL
‘A thrilling and gifted writer’
FINANCIAL TIMES
‘Dizzyingly, dazzlingly good’
DAILY MAIL
‘Mitchell is, clearly, a genius’
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
‘An author of extraordinary ambition and skill’
INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
‘A superb storyteller’
THE NEW YORKER
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Reviews
Mitchell has written another complex novel, in which multiple themes run like streams of extra data beneath every incident, and understanding comes by the process of reading into a satisfying tangle of metaphor and reference. It is the best kind of contemporary fiction
Luminously beautiful . . . It celebrates the liberating power of language while reviewing without bitterness or resentment the role that inarticulacy, shyness, even bullying, might play in shaping the future career of a writer
Hugely touching and enjoyable
The everyday details of Jason's life are lyrically transformed by the power of Mitchell's prose, which is beguiling, funny, beautifully poetic and always keenly observed. Black Swan Green is just gorgeous
Black Swan Green's 'I love 1982' nostalgia is a glassy, pitch-perfect, mock-innocent surface through which something rotten might appear
A delight to read from beginning to end
Spry, disconcerting and moving. It is also extremely funny even - or especially - at the blackest of moments
A pitch-perfect study of a time and a place
David Mitchell's beautiful novel of growing up and learning to accept the fragility of the world shows he can do subtle, slow and moving every bit as well as he did dazzling and mind-boggling in the past works
What is so impressive about Black Swan Green . . . is how entirely the formal artifice accommodates a naturalistic, and a thoroughly felt, story about human beings. Black Swan Green is, as its protagonist would put it, ace
All the drama and inadvertent comedy of the onset of adolescence are brilliantly laid bare . . . a deceptively easy read, at times uproariously funny
Playful and inventive, Mitchell stretches language and ideas with exuberant abandon . . . he inhabits the mind of his troubled teenager with spellbinding conviction
A very fine and tightly structured novel . . . Mitchell pulls off a beautifully ironic piece of ventriloquism; the narrator's voice is pitched perfectly and entirely credibly, the dialogue never falters
Intricate and beautiful
Alternately nostalgic, funny and heartbreaking . . . Mitchell has a perfect ear for that most calamitous year, the first of the teens, when we come face-to-face with the volatile nature of life
Brilliant . . . In Jason, Mitchell creates an evocative yet authentically adolescent voice, an achievement even more impressive than the ventriloquism of his earlier books
In Black Swan Green the most prodigiously daring and imaginative writer in Britain brings his formidable gifts very close to home . . . he makes the well-worn coming-of-age novel feel vivid and uncomfortable and new . . . he's as vital - as shouting and original and central - a voice as the contemporary novel has to offer. He's shown us dazzling power before; here he wins us with vulnerability
Touching and funny . . . a book that brilliantly captures the awkward intensity of adolescence
A terrific evocation of a particular time and place and the traumas of a particular age group . . . an oddly beautiful slice of complex life
The family life of the Taylors is achingly plausible, the characters fully drawn, and Mitchell is adept at revealing appalling pettiness as a signifier of larger issues. This is a book about finding strength in unknown places
One of the most endearing, smart, and funny young narrators ever to rise up from the pages of a novel . . . The always fresh and brilliant writing will carry readers back to their own childhoods . . . enchanting
This book is so entertainingly strange, so packed with activity, adventures, and diverting banter, that you only realize as the extraordinary novel concludes that the timid boy has grown before your eyes into a capable young man