The author of Cloud Atlas's most ambitious novel yet, for the readers of Ishiguro, Murakami, and, of course, David Mitchell.

The year is 1799, the place Dejima, the "high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island" that is the Japanese Empire's single port and sole window to the world. It is also the farthest-flung outpost of the powerful Dutch East Indies Company. To this place of superstition and swamp fever, crocodiles and courtesans, earthquakes and typhoons, comes Jacob de Zoet. The young, devout and ambitious clerk must spend five years in the East to earn enough money to deserve the hand of his wealthy fiancée. But Jacob's intentions are shifted, his character shaken and his soul stirred when he meets Orito Aibagawa, the beautiful and scarred daughter of a Samurai, midwife to the island's powerful magistrate. In this world where East and West are linked by one bridge, Jacob sees the gaps shrink between pleasure and piety, propriety and profit. Magnificently written, a superb mix of historical research and heedless imagination, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a big and unforgettable book that will be read for years to come.


From the Hardcover edition.

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WINNER 2011 - Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Eurasia)

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#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 

Shortlisted for the Galaxy National Book Awards – Waterstone’s UK Author of the Year
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize
 
A TIME Best Book
A Washington Post Best Book
A Financial Times Best Book
A New Yorker Best Book
A Globe and Mail Best Book
A New York Times Notable Book
 
“Not only a characteristically spectacular display of sheer talent, ambition, energy and vision, but [also] . . . a seismically moving and harrowingly human book that will enrich and enliven your existence.”
 — Jared Bland, The Walrus

“Let’s . . . call David Mitchell the David Bowie of contemporary fiction. . . . If Mitchell is Bowie, then, and if his novels are albums, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is his Station to Station — sprawling, epic, infused with an elusive otherness yet with all the crowd-pleasing trappings of a popular blockbuster.”
— The Gazette
 
“The amount of research that must have gone into this meticulous, wide-ranging work of historical fiction is staggering. . . . [Mitchell] uses it to immerse the reader fully in not one world, but several. . . . An exhilarating feeling to be the hands of such a virtuosic storyteller.”
— Winnipeg Free Press
 
“Guarantees fiction of exceptional intelligence, richness and vitality.”
— The Globe and Mail
 
“[Mitchell has] created his most conventional but most emotionally engaging novel yet. . . . An affecting conclusion . . . underscores Mr. Mitchell’s mastery here not only of virtuosic literary fireworks, but also of the quieter arts of empathy and traditional storytelling.”
— Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
 
“Spectacularly accomplished and thrillingly suspenseful . . . a narrative of panoramic span. . . . Prodigiously researched, it resurrects place and period with riveting immediacy. Imagining, with corresponding fullness, not just its characters’ present predicaments but their pasts and futures, it brims with rich, involving and affecting humanity.”
— The Sunday Times


From the Hardcover edition.

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DAVID MITCHELL is the author of Ghostwritten, Number9Dream, Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green. He is a two-time finalist for the Man Booker Prize and one of Granta magazine's Best Young British Novelists. He lives in Ireland with his wife and two children.


From the Hardcover edition.

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