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In outward form, Number9Dream is a Dickensian coming-of-age journey: Young dreamer Eiji Miyake, from remote rural Japan, thrust out on his own by his sister's death and his mother's breakdown, comes to Tokyo in pursuit of the father who abandoned him. Stumbling around this strange, awesome city, he trips over and crosses - through a hidden destiny or just monstrously bad luck - a number of its secret power centers. Suddenly, the riddle of his father's identity becomes just one of the increasingly urgent questions Eiji must answer.
In 1799, the artificial island of Dejima lies in Nagasaki Harbor as Japan’s outpost for the Dutch East Indies Company. There, Jacob de Zoet has come to make a fortune large enough to return to Holland and marry the woman he loves.
From award-winning writer David Mitchell comes a sinewy, meditative novel of boyhood on the cusp of adulthood and the old on the cusp of the new. Black Swan Green tracks a single year in what is, for 13-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in dying Cold War England, 1982. But the 13 chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy.
Down the road from a working-class British pub, along the brick wall of a narrow alley, if the conditions are exactly right, you'll find the entrance to Slade House. A stranger will greet you by name and invite you inside. At first, you won't want to leave. Later, you'll find that you can't. Every nine years, the house's residents - an odd brother and sister - extend a unique invitation to someone who's different or lonely: a precocious teenager, a recently divorced policeman, a shy college student. But what really goes on inside Slade House? For those who find out, it's already too late....
Following a scalding row with her mother, 15-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: A sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as "the radio people," Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life.
A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan's California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified "dinery server" on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation: the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other's echoes down the corridor of history.
In outward form, Number9Dream is a Dickensian coming-of-age journey: Young dreamer Eiji Miyake, from remote rural Japan, thrust out on his own by his sister's death and his mother's breakdown, comes to Tokyo in pursuit of the father who abandoned him. Stumbling around this strange, awesome city, he trips over and crosses - through a hidden destiny or just monstrously bad luck - a number of its secret power centers. Suddenly, the riddle of his father's identity becomes just one of the increasingly urgent questions Eiji must answer.
In 1799, the artificial island of Dejima lies in Nagasaki Harbor as Japan’s outpost for the Dutch East Indies Company. There, Jacob de Zoet has come to make a fortune large enough to return to Holland and marry the woman he loves.
From award-winning writer David Mitchell comes a sinewy, meditative novel of boyhood on the cusp of adulthood and the old on the cusp of the new. Black Swan Green tracks a single year in what is, for 13-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in dying Cold War England, 1982. But the 13 chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy.
Down the road from a working-class British pub, along the brick wall of a narrow alley, if the conditions are exactly right, you'll find the entrance to Slade House. A stranger will greet you by name and invite you inside. At first, you won't want to leave. Later, you'll find that you can't. Every nine years, the house's residents - an odd brother and sister - extend a unique invitation to someone who's different or lonely: a precocious teenager, a recently divorced policeman, a shy college student. But what really goes on inside Slade House? For those who find out, it's already too late....
Following a scalding row with her mother, 15-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: A sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as "the radio people," Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life.
A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan's California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified "dinery server" on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation: the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other's echoes down the corridor of history.
In this vivid and compelling novel, Tim Murphy follows a diverse set of characters whose fates intertwine in an iconic building in Manhattan's East Village, the Christodora. The Christodora is home to Milly and Jared, a privileged young couple with artistic ambitions. Their neighbor, Hector, a Puerto Rican gay man who was once a celebrated AIDS activist but is now a lonely addict, becomes connected to Milly and Jared's lives in ways none of them can anticipate.
A father and daughter try to survive the steady decline of all they know in this haunting thriller from award-winning author Ronald Malfi. First the birds disappeared. Then the insects took over. Then the madness began. They call it Wanderer's Folly - a disease of delusions, of daydreams and nightmares. A plague threatening to wipe out the human race.
Best-selling author William Boyd—the novelist who has been called a “master storyteller” ( Chicago Tribune) and “a gutsy writer who is good company to keep” ( Time)—here gives us his most entertaining, sly, and compelling novel to date. The novel evokes the tumult, events, and iconic faces of our time as it tells the story of Logan Mountstuart—writer, lover, and man of the world—through his intimate journals. It is the “riotous and disorganized reality” of Mountstuart’s 85 years in all their extraordinary, tragic, and humorous aspects.
Shevek, a brilliant physicist, decides to take action. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have isolated his planet of anarchists from the rest of the civilized universe. To do this dangerous task will mean giving up his family and possibly his life. Shevek must make the unprecedented journey to the utopian mother planet, Anarres, to challenge the complex structures of life and living, and ignite the fires of change.
Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but 10, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.
In Queen's Bench Courtroom Number Seven, famous author Abraham Cady stands trial. In his book The Holocaust - born of the terrible revelation that the Jadwiga Concentration camp was the site of his family's extermination - Cady shook the consciousness of the human race. He also named eminent surgeon Sir Adam Kelno as one of Jadwiga's most sadistic inmate/doctors. Kelno has denied this and brought furious charges. Now unfolds Leon Uris' riveting courtroom drama - one of the great fictional trials of the century.
Bo Mason, his wife, and his two boys live a transient life of poverty and despair. Drifting from town to town and from state to state, the violent, ruthless Bo seeks his fortune in the hotel business, in new farmland, and, eventually, in illegal rum-running throughout the treacherous back roads of the American Northwest.
Locked behind bars for three years, Shadow did his time, quietly waiting for the day when he could return to Eagle Point, Indiana. A man no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, all he wanted was to be with Laura, the wife he deeply loved, and start a new life. But just days before his release, Laura and Shadow's best friend are killed in an accident. With his life in pieces and nothing to keep him tethered, Shadow accepts a job from a beguiling stranger he meets on the way home, an enigmatic man who calls himself Mr. Wednesday.
Glen Runciter runs a lucrative business - deploying his teams of anti-psychics to corporate clients who want privacy and security from psychic spies. But when he and his top team are ambushed by a rival, he is gravely injured and placed in "half-life," a dreamlike state of suspended animation. Soon, though, the surviving members of the team begin experiencing some strange phenomena, such as Runciter's face appearing on coins and the world seeming to move backward in time.
In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat.... Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid 16-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.
In Catherine Lowell's smart and original debut novel, the only remaining descendant of the Brontë family embarks on a modern-day literary scavenger hunt to find the family's long-rumored secret estate, using only the clues her eccentric father left behind and the Brontës' own novels. Samantha Whipple is used to stirring up speculation wherever she goes. Since her father's untimely death, she is the presumed heir to a long-rumored trove of diaries, paintings, letters, and early novel drafts.
Eight hundred women and children begin a 1,200-mile journey on foot across Japanese-occupied Malaya. At journey’s end, only 30 will still be alive. This is the story of one woman, of her ordeal, and of how she was saved by the sacrifice of an Australian soldier. It is a story of rare individual courage in the face of certain death, and hope in the face of despair.
Oblivious to the bizarre ways in which their lives intersect, nine characters - a terrorist in Okinawa, a record-shop clerk in Tokyo, a money-laundering British financier in Hong Kong, an old woman running a tea shack in China, a transmigrating "noncorpum" entity seeking a human host in Mongolia, a gallery-attendant-cum-art-thief in Petersburg, a drummer in London, a female physicist in Ireland, and a radio deejay in New York - hurtle toward a shared destiny of astonishing impact. Like the book's one non-human narrator, Mitchell latches onto his host characters and invades their lives with parasitic precision, making Ghostwritten a sprawling and brilliant literary relief map of the modern world.
I'm a bit amazed that David Mitchell was only in his late 20s when he wrote this kaleidoscopic novel, given his adeptness with language, setting, voice, and ideas. As in his more famous (and later) Cloud Atlas, Mitchell blends history, tragedy, wit, myth, metaphysics, moral questions, and consciously cinematic melodrama into a swirling literary collage.
Like Cloud Atlas, this one contains a set of loosely-linked stories that take place in different locations around the world and, in some cases, span decades of history. The protagonist of each is at some moment in his or her life when everything is about to change. There's a Japanese doomsday cultist whose conviction in his deluded belief system gives rise to disquieting, yet infecting observations about the world. There's a young, jazz-obsessed slacker working in a Tokyo record store (an obvious Murakami nod), who falls in love with a girl that happens to wander in by a chance. There's a harried 30-something British financier watching his life and his biggest deal fall apart, while convinced that his Hong Kong apartment is haunted by a ghost. There's an old Chinese woman who runs a noodle stand on a sacred mountain, and has come through much history mostly by being beneath its concern. There's a “noncorpum”, a disembodied spirit that transfers itself between human hosts and travels across Mongolia, in search of its own origins. There's a female Russian art thief, waiting for the moment to carry out a big heist, but acutely conscious of her departing youth.
Unlike Cloud Atlas, which played games with which stories were "real" (and what "real" ultimately means in the context of imaginative constructions), this book puts its characters on the same broad stage and has them crossing paths with one another. At first, the connections are fleeting, but as the book progresses, the stories and their themes intersect more and more, building towards a crescendo that includes an Irish quantum physicist trying to evade the militaristic designs of the US government, a noncorpum of another sort, and a late night radio DJ on the eve of the end of the world.
Mitchell is mad juggler of a writer, taking a collection of ideas that would be somewhat hackneyed on their own, and reconfiguring them into a grand mural in motion. Each story has its own lyrically sordid details, powerful truths, and cosmic absurdities, yet their meaning is in their connectedness. It would seem that we’re all ghosts in one another’s machines, mostly unconscious of each other, yet profoundly linked, part of the same endless universal cycle of suffering, joy, death, and rebirth.
It's not hard to see that this was Mitchell's first book. There's a sense of a young author appropriating ideas with the enthusiasm of a rail tourist snapping photos, though with enough tongue-in-cheek that it doesn't feel like theft. And the ending, which borrows elements from sci-fi B-movies, feels a little clumsy and preachy compared to the rest of the book.
Still, it’s a damn impressive debut, showcasing Mitchell’s ample gifts at technique and full of questions and beautiful insights. If you like literary fiction that hovers on the edge of fanciful, without crossing over into full-blown magic realism, then he’s someone you should read. Cloud Atlas is my personal favorite, but if that one sounds too meta, you might connect more with Ghostwritten. I'm pretty happy with the audiobook narrator chosen here, William Rycroft. He doesn't do a wide range of accents, but his tone and delivery are quite skillful.
16 of 16 people found this review helpful
So Kill me. I really like David Mitchell, and reading this knowing it was his first novel is one of those things you can only really believe if you've read his other novels. This seems like an embryonic version of Cloud Atlas, with a lot of the same ideas, themes, and even a borrowed character or two. But that seems unfair, because most floret-novels never actually seem beautiful before their time. This one seems both a shinny fetus and world-ready.
This baby was my JAM. Yes, there are/were times (each of his books have several TIMES) when Mitchell's transcendent/jazzy/flash*flash/UnitedColorsofBeneton schtick gets a little tired, but he still pulls it off. Kind of like when I'm watching the Winter Olympics and I get a little overwhelmed by the flamboyance of the whole "we-are-the-world-in-tights" routine, but I still end up watching most of the crazy programing.
Anyway, it was fun to read and to already know the future. I read this already knowing that Mitchell wasn't going to be a one-hit-wonder, that his best books were ahead of him, that he would always have an Asian thing, that the Wachowskis/Tom Hanks would almost RUIN Cloud Atlas for me, that I would read every book he ever publishes, and usually buy several copies in many formats for several friends.
28 of 32 people found this review helpful
As other reviewers have said, this is kaleidoscopic in that it has several loosely (and sometimes surprisingly) linked stories - incredibly imaginative, very deep, unpredictable, fascinating and beautifully written.
Do not read/listen to this expecting anything like a straightforward story or even, necessarily, a point. You immerse yourself in the experience, and just try to take it all in, while your jaw drops periodically b/c of an amazing bit of writing or way of exploring an idea. Being inside this book (like with Cloud Atlas) creates a kind of awe, and amazement that someone's mind works this way.
If you like Mitchell's writing, you will love this. If you are looking for lighter entertainment, a neat story or anything like closure at the end, this may not be your cup of tea.
The performance is remarkable, with the reader taking on and giving voice to a wide range of characters with precision and grace.
8 of 9 people found this review helpful
This is a novel that demands close listening/reading and re-reading. With Ghostwritten, Mitchell creates a world of intertwined stories and narrators -- a mashup of styles, and an intricate mosaic whose network of gaps are as critical as the fragments that make up
its whole. Human characters narrate their sections alongside beings without bodies and a deity whose body is a network of signals, voices, and satellites. As witty and moving as the most literate fiction and as imaginative and mythic as the best science fiction, Ghostwritten will leave you awe-struck and electrified to go back to the first page and take the ride again. The audiobook narrator had the daunting task of evoking these diverse voices and did so excellently!
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
I have really enjoyed a number of audio books but this is the only one I have ever finished and then immediately gone back to start all over again. I loved the final story but the knowledge of the end made me realise that I had missed all sorts of things on the way. I had to go back and start again. Very rewarding. The narrator was excellent too.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
First, the narrator gave no indication that he was moving from one person to the next. Often it took me a minute to figure out we were on to a new character. I rewound this book more than any other I've listened to because I didn't know what's going on.
In addition, the story felt incomplete. The ending was more a beginning and I'm still not certain what the story was actually about. If you want to try this author, I recommend The Bone Clocks instead. THAT was a great book and fabulously narrated!
5 of 6 people found this review helpful
Great story, complex and mysterious per usual from Mitchell. Vivid descriptions of the interior and subterranean selves. production could have benefited from longer pauses or short musical segue between shifts in narration.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
Love everything he's ever written. Mitchell is a high-wire genius who channels characters in spider web plots that astound.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
Ghostwritten will put you in the shoes of characters that find themselves in extraordinary situations. You will feel what the characters feel through David Mitchell's storytelling ability and superb command of English.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
If you could sum up Ghostwritten in three words, what would they be?
Brilliant. Engaging. Well-written.
What did you like best about this story?
That I was never, ever bored and stayed up late into the night listening.
Which character – as performed by William Rycroft – was your favorite?
I like Mo very much. It is hard to name only one.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
Yes.
Any additional comments?
I read The Bone Clocks first. I wish I had known more about David Mitchell and read this one first, as I prefer to read in chronological order. However, Bone Clocks let me know I would read all of his books. Two more to go!
2 of 3 people found this review helpful