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David Mitchell

Black Swan Green Paperback – 8 March 2007

by David Mitchell (Author)

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Arrives: 8 - 11 Feb

The dazzling novel from critically-acclaimed David Mitchell.

Shortlisted for the 2006 Costa Novel Award

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2006

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.

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Product details

ASIN : 0340822805
Publisher : Sceptre; 1st edition (8 March 2007)
Language : English
Paperback : 384 pages
ISBN-10 : 9780340822807
ISBN-13 : 978-0340822807
Dimensions : 14.3 x 2.6 x 19.8 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 79,147 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 7,443 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- 10,540 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- 33,099 in Religion & Spirituality (Books)

Customer Reviews:
404 ratings

Product description

Review

Black Swan Green's 'I love 1982' nostalgia is a glassy, pitch-perfect, mock-innocent surface through which something rotten might appear. -- Ali Smith ― Sunday Telegraph

David Mitchell is dizzyingly, dazzlingly good . . . Black Swan Green is just gorgeous. -- Eithne Farry ― Daily Mail

It is the best kind of contemporary fiction. ― TLS

Hugely touching and enjoyable. -- Rachel Cooke, Summer Reads ― Observer

A delight to read from beginning to end. ― Sunday Express

Luminously beautiful. ― The Times

Review

David Mitchell is dizzyingly, dazzlingly good . . . Black Swan Green is just gorgeous. - Daily Mail

Luminously beautiful - The Times

Intricate and beautiful - Time Out

It is the best kind of contemporary fiction - TLS

Rich and strange - Guardian

Black Swan Green's 'I love 1982' nostalgia is a glassy, pitch-perfect, mock-innocent surface through which something rotten might appear - Sunday Telegraph

Book Description

Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award

From the Publisher

Born in 1969, David Mitchell grew up in Worcestershire. After graduating from Kent University, he taught English in Japan, where he wrote his first novel, Ghostwritten. Published in 1999, it was awarded the Mail on Sunday John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His second novel, number9dream, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and in 2003, David Mitchell was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. His third novel, Cloud Atlas, was shortlisted for six awards including the Man Booker Prize, and adapted for film in 2012. It was followed by Black Swan Green, shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year Award, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which was a No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller. Both were also longlisted for the Booker.

In 2013, The Reason I Jump: One Boy's Voice From the Silence of Autism by Naoki Higashida was published in a translation from the Japanese by David Mitchell and KA Yoshida. David Mitchell's sixth novel is The Bone Clocks (Sceptre, 2014).

About the Author

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 John Llewellyn Rhys, Geoffrey Faber Memorial and South Bank Show Literature Prizes among others, and been named a Granta Best Young British Novelist. In 2018, he won the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, given in recognition of a writer's entire body of work.

In addition, David Mitchell together with KA Yoshida has translated from Japanese two books by Naoki Higashida - The Reason I Jump: One Boy's Voice from the Silence of Autism and Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight: A Young Man's Voice from the Silence of Autism.

He lives with in Ireland with his family.

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5 star		63%
4 star		23%
3 star		8%
2 star		4%
1 star		2%

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Lis Faenza

Deftly crafted, beautifully written.

Reviewed in Australia on 10 May 2016

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David Mitchell never disappoints. I particularly love the way all his works weave together, connected by fragments handled delicately. If you've read The Bone Clocks, you'll love this portrait of teenage of what it was to be young in the UK during the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher, when kids still played outside and discovered what they were made of.

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Angela Carr

A great read

Reviewed in Australia on 4 February 2016

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This was a great story of a young boy growing up in England during the Falklands war. It is a funny and sad story of a young boy who has a stammer and is often ostracised because of his disability. He is a very determined and resilient boy who finds friendships and gets up to lots of mischief and adventures.

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Shannon

Another Mitchell Hit

Reviewed in Australia on 24 May 2016

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Heart pulling description of young teenage issues in the tough love 80's was too close to home to be all amusing. Beautifully written and well worth the read!

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Matthew Haynes

A beautifully written snapshot of a boy growing up

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 May 2017

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Black Swan Green by David Mitchell is a beautiful book that left me thinking ‘damn, I wish I’d written that!’. I could relate a lot to the story of thirteen-year-old Jason who has a stammer, secretly writes poetry, has an older sister and dysfunctional parents. It’s set in the early 1980s which is almost spot on the right time for me to get all the cultural references that Mitchell puts into the story.

There’s an entertaining link to his more famous novel The Cloud Atlas and well-observed and beautifully written passages about growing up in the Eighties, the constant fight to avoid bullies at school and out of school, trying to understand your parents and learning about girls. There’s not all that much of a character arc but it really doesn’t matter – it’s a great snapshot of a point in time and if it is not somewhat autobiographical then its a very convincing character that Mitchell has created in the form of Jason.

The details about how Jason’s stammer ‘behaves’ and how he fights to control it is very interesting and although some of the content is rather painful it’s not without its humour or poetry. A thirteen-year-old’s fight to have some kind of control over his life and form a comfortable identity is very well portrayed.

4 people found this helpful

sashaknits

I enjoyed how evocative of the 80s the book was

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 December 2017

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Quite mixed feelings on this one. I enjoyed how evocative of the 80s the book was. The playful use of language to reflect how Jason is a budding poet and a person with a speech impediment was clever and added to the richness of the overall work. I also found the depiction of fighting parents awkwardly realistic.

On the downside, the story itself was a bit bland for David Mitchell. I know it's an outlier in his usual body of work, but the coming of age narrative just didn't strike a spark for me. The tendency to stop chapters abruptly was also really frustrating by the end!

Still a solid 3 stars, possibly 3.5 due to how much I enjoyed the writing style and for the nod to Robert Frobisher, but if you're looking for the "usual" David Mitchell then you could skip this one and not really be missing out.

3 people found this helpful

Kevin, The Wonder Horse

Brilliant

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 July 2020

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I think my favourite, so far, from Mitchell.

I am only a little bit younger than the main character, whilst I grew up in a city and not a small village, as he did, Mitchells depiction of growing up in the 1980's certainly chimes with my recollections. Bad things happen, good things happen, he grows up. Its just a nice, warm, comforting read.

For me, I have this book in the same mental pigeon hole I have Iain Banks' Crow Road.

Guy

Re-connect with your teenage self

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 December 2014

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More brilliance from Mitchell, he's physically incapable of writing a bad book. The plot summary on it's own wouldn't have inspired me to pick up this book were I not already a fan of the author, but any reservations about reading a novel from the POV of a 13-year-old were quickly assuaged by the free-flowing, poetic prose that felt extremely authentic from the off and scene after scene of highly relatable situations of Jason Taylor's home, school and social life that took me right back to my own formative years.

Characters cross over from a couple of other Mitchell novels too - Eva (daughter of Vyvyan) Ayres from Cloud Atlas is slightly shoehorned in to give a lecture on poetry, and a young Neal Brose, before his stint as a Hong Kong trader in Ghostwritten, is also present as one of Jason's classmates.

By far Mitchell's most accessible novel, my wife also enjoyed it (probably even more than I did) and it's that rare beast of a book that is both literary and could be given as a gift to pretty much anyone safe in the knowledge that they'll find something inside to connect with and enjoy.

4 people found this helpful

Matthew Bakewell

This book is about my childhood!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 31 January 2016

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If you grew up in the 80s, then this is a thrilling time machine for you to climb into and re-experience how horrible it all was. At first I wasn't sure about the narrative voice - a little contrived - but within 20 pages I was hooked. Like a lot of Mitchell, a little magical realism slipped in and at least one character from another of his books ('the Mitchell universe'!), and it captures growing pains and the internal world of a teen exquisitely. Yes, it's I 'heart' (crossed out) 1980, but some beautiful prose in there, some very real characters and for me, it's always clinched by the ending - Bone Clocks didn't quite do it for me, but this ends brilliantly.

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