Slade House – David Mitchell

Slade House - David Mitchell
Slade House – David Mitchell

Every nine years, atemporal twins Norah and Jonah lure an engifted to Slade House and consume their soul.

Each chapter comes with its own character – from musical mother and son Rita and Nathan Bishop to Dr Iris Marinus-Ferriby, via unreconstructed Detective Inspector Gordon Edmonds, shy student Sal Timms, and her sister Freya – and brings another encounter between the two sides of the Atemporal Schism, in the ongoing battle between the two David Mitchell introduced us to in The Bone Clocks.

Publisher’s page: Slade House – David Mitchell

The Bone Clocks – David Mitchell

Six super chapters spanning six decades of Holly Sykes’ life, from Gravesend to Sheep’s Head via a Swiss ski resort, marriage and motherhood with a war zone reporter and a succession of encounters with various Atemporals, as the sporadic war between the Horologists and the Anchorites swirls around her.

Plus a cast of characters glimpsed to a greater or lesser extent in David Mitchell’s other novels. Smashing!

Author’s webpage: The Bone Clocks – David Mitchell

Great interview with David Mitchell from The Guardian’s A Life In…. published back in August 2014.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet – David Mitchell

Wonderful.

Finely researched on both the empire of the Dutch East India Company and Japan’s traditional, closed society of the same era, with wonderful characters – good, bad and ugly – David Mitchell has done a brilliant job of bringing to life a remote era and distant part of the world.

Coming to the end of the story on the overnight train from Berlin to Paris, I cried.

Amazon.co.uk link: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet – David Mitchell

Black Swan Green – David Mitchell

I loved this – read it in one sitting, on my last day of holiday in Shanghai. I’m sure it’s a novel that will resonate more with thirtysomethings than other age groups, and particularly those who grew up outside London, but it is a great story of events in a tricky teenage year, told from the perspective of an articulate (albeit stammer-afflicted), emotionally well developed boy/young man.

In terms of style – and David Mitchell does have a reputation for his Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten structure – Black Swan Green‘s “normal” narrative makes a refreshing change from the plot/character/literary style onion skins of previous novels.

Amazon.co.uk link: Black Swan Green – David Mitchell

Ghostwritten – David Mitchell

An unexpected delight. I remembered thoroughly enjoying Cloud Atlas, and I’d not expected this earlier novel to use a simpler version of the linked stories theme, and I enjoyed it just as much.

Each chapter features a different genre, time and place, and largely separate characters – but there are just the occasional chance connections between people that link all of them together – although you probably don’t realise the significance at the time. The result is a novel that illustrates the butterfly effect theory, although in this case it is hard to work out who is the butterfly and which (where?) is the tornado.

Amazon.co.uk link: Ghostwritten – David Mitchell