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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
David Mitchell
Random House
July 2010
On Sale: June 29, 2010
496 pages
ISBN: 1400065453
EAN: 9781400065455
Hardcover
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Fiction
In 2007, Time magazine named him one of the most influential
novelists in the world. He has twice been short-listed for
the Man Booker Prize. The New York Times Book Review called
him simply “a genius.” Now David Mitchell lends fresh
credence to The Guardian’s claim that “each of his books
seems entirely different from that which preceded it.” The
Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a stunning departure
for this brilliant, restless, and wildly ambitious author, a
giant leap forward by even his own high standards. A bold
and epic novel of a rarely visited point in history, it is a
work as exquisitely rendered as it is irresistibly readable. The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the
“high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island” that is the
Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the
world, designed to keep the West at bay; the farthest
outpost of the war-ravaged Dutch East Indies Company; and a
de facto prison for the dozen foreigners permitted to live
and work there. To this place of devious merchants,
deceitful interpreters, costly courtesans, earthquakes, and
typhoons comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young
clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of
sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiancée back
in Holland. But Jacob’s original intentions are eclipsed after a chance
encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a
samurai doctor and midwife to the city’s powerful
magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and
pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash
promise made and then fatefully broken. The consequences
will extend beyond Jacob’s worst imaginings. As one cynical
colleague asks, “Who ain’t a gambler in the glorious Orient,
with his very life?” A magnificent mix of luminous writing, prodigious research,
and heedless imagination, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de
Zoet is the most impressive achievement of its eminent author.
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