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Pointed, funny, profound, left-field, elegiac, and painted with the stuff of life, BLACK SWAN GREEN is David Mitchell's subtlest and most effective achievement to date.
Random House
April 2006
304 pages
ISBN: 1400063795
Hardcover
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Fiction
From award-winning writer David Mitchell comes a sinewy,
meditative novel of boyhood on the cusp of adulthood and the
old on the cusp of the new. Black Swan tracks a single year in what is, for
thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in
muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982.
But the thirteen chapters, each a short story in its own
right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything
but sleepy. A world of Kissingeresque realpolitik enacted in
boys' games on a frozen lake; of "nightcreeping" through the
summer backyards of strangers; of the tabloid-fueled thrills
of the Falklands War and its human toll; of the cruel,
luscious Dawn Madden and her power-hungry boyfriend, Ross
Wilcox; of a certain Madame Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck,
an elderly bohemian emigre' who is both more and less than
she appears; of Jason's search to replace his dead
grandfather's irreplaceable smashed watch before the crime
is discovered; of first cigarettes, first kisses, first
Duran Duran LPs, and first deaths; of Margaret Thatcher's
recession; of Gypsies camping in the woods and the hysteria
they inspire; and, even closer to home, of a slow-motion
divorce in four seasons.
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