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Also by David Mitchell:

The Bone Clocks, September 2014
Hardcover / e-Book
Cloud Atlas, October 2012
Paperback / e-Book
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, March 2011
Hardcover
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, July 2010
Hardcover
Black Swan Green, April 2006
Hardcover

THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET
By: 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.

Media Buzz

Weekend Edition Saturday - August 21, 2010
Fresh Air - NPR - August 5, 2010
Fresh Air - NPR - July 7, 2010