Sceptre
Sceptre
Sceptre
Hodder & Stoughton
Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial and Commonwealth Writers' Prizes
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.
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
A message to David Mitchell's Australian fans
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell - FILM TRAILER
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
A message to David Mitchell's Australian fans
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell - FILM TRAILER
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
David Mitchell is the author of the novels Ghostwritten, number9dream, Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, The Bone Clocks, Slade House and Utopia Avenue. He has been shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize, won the World Fantasy Award, and the John Llewellyn Rhys, Geoffrey Faber Memorial and South Bank Show Literature Prizes, among others. In 2018, he won the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, given in recognition of a writer's entire body of work. His screenwriting credits include the TV shows Pachinko and Sense8, and the movie Matrix: Resurrections.
In addition, David Mitchell together with KA Yoshida has translated from Japanese two autism memoirs by Naoki Higashida: The Reason I Jump and Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight.
He lives in Ireland.