David Mitchell is a former bookseller who was born in 1970. He currently teaches in Hiroshima. Ghostwritten is his first novel. A section of the book was published in New Writing 8. He is currently working on his second novel, a story about Triads in London.
Mongolia, extracted from his forthcoming novel Ghostwritten, is distinguished by its fluid prose and sophisticated narrative control. If the rest of the novel is as good as this, there seems little doubt that Mitchell will achieve considerable success - The Independent ( reviewing New Writing 8 )'A boundless, fully imagined novel born out of a profound engagement with the relationship between fiction and reality...The emotional, the social, the political are cross-hatched to form the vistas of individual lives. Thus the novel's dramas play out against each other in a landscape so beautifully constructed that everything exists in relation to everything else....Each of these parts is a fine story, gracefully entire: the novels many concersna are thus expressed from their own thought-out core, creating a panoply of styles and themes difficult to credit to a single author...This is the best modern novel I have read for a long time'Rachel Cusk in the Sunday ExpressOne of the best first novels I've read for a long time...I couldn't put it down - A S Byatt, Mail on Sunday'David Mitchell's first novel is a firework display, shooting off in a dozen different narrative directions and united, somewhere up in the stratosphere, only by a thin trace of metaphysical speculation. With it's high-octane speculations on chance and fate, it will no doubt become labelled, fatuousl
Gleefully self-referential, slyly philosophical, subtly postmodern, Mitchell's debut novel consists of nine intertwining tales and the people who move within and among them. Spanning the globeDfrom teeming Tokyo to the isolated Holy Mountain, from the idyllic Clear Island to Old Man LondonDthe characters also run the gamut: criminal, professional, genius, provincial, fanatic. The novel evades the reader's aim to discern a moral, instead exploring the motions of consciousness through various lives in nine distinct and elegant voices. Although the numerous viewpoints can be distancing, the challenges of this intellectual puzzle propel the reader to the rather bizarre but compelling last two chapters. As Mitchell's Mr. Cavendish purports, "We all think we're in control of our own lives, but really they're pre-ghostwritten by forces around us." So how well does the thing read? Very well. Perhaps not revelatory, but this contemplative pleasure of a book is recommended for all public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/00.]DAnn Kim, "Library Journal" Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Mongolia, extracted from his forthcoming novel Ghostwritten, is distinguished by its fluid prose and sophisticated narrative control. If the rest of the novel is as good as this, there seems little doubt that Mitchell will achieve considerable success - The Independent ( reviewing New Writing 8 )'A boundless, fully imagined novel born out of a profound engagement with the relationship between fiction and reality...The emotional, the social, the political are cross-hatched to form the vistas of individual lives. Thus the novel's dramas play out against each other in a landscape so beautifully constructed that everything exists in relation to everything else....Each of these parts is a fine story, gracefully entire: the novels many concersna are thus expressed from their own thought-out core, creating a panoply of styles and themes difficult to credit to a single author...This is the best modern novel I have read for a long time'Rachel Cusk in the Sunday ExpressOne of the best first novels I've read for a long time...I couldn't put it down - A S Byatt, Mail on Sunday'David Mitchell's first novel is a firework display, shooting off in a dozen different narrative directions and united, somewhere up in the stratosphere, only by a thin trace of metaphysical speculation. With it's high-octane speculations on chance and fate, it will no doubt become labelled, fatuousl
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