Black Swan Green

David Mitchell’s wry, painful and disconcertingly funny novel charts 13 months in the black hole between childhood and adolescence.

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.

"If this at times gives Black Swan Green the flavor of a novel for so-called young adults, reader be warned: Along with passages of dream-sharp beauty, there are images of a nightmarish brutality that burn on in the mind long after the fine, final line."  -  Kai Maristed, The Los Angeles Times

"The achievement of Black Swan Green is the way it realises the potential for both humour and pathos in the social awkwardness of adolescence -- the way Jason's desperate need to be accepted inevitably creates a sense of conflict about his burgeoning individuality."  -  James Ley, The Age

David Mitchell won the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence in 2018, given in recognition of a writer’s entire body of work. He 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 has been named a Granta Best Young British Novelist.