Utopia Avenue: The Number One Sunday Times Bestseller

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'ONE OF THE MOST BRILLIANTLY INVENTIVE WRITERS OF THIS, OR ANY, COUNTRY' Independent

The Number One Sunday Times Bestseller

'Wildly entertaining'

Spectator

'A stand-out triumph'

Sunday Times

'Superb'

Literary Review

'Impressive'

New Yorker

'Highly entertaining'

Times Literary Supplement

A story of music and dreams, drugs and madness, love and grief, from the acclaimed author of Cloud Atlas

The year is 1967 and word is spreading about a new band on London's psychedelic scene - an unlikely combination of a female folksinger, a blues bassist, a jazz drummer and an electric guitarist. Strangers to each other and from widely different backgrounds, together they create magic. Meet Utopia Avenue.

This is the story of a unique band's brief, blazing journey from Soho dives to chart success and on to the promised land of America, just when the Summer of Love was giving way to something much darker - a tale of dreams, drugs, sexuality, madness and grief, and of fame's pitfalls. Capturing a time when youthful idealism collided with jaded reality, this bewitching novel celebrates the power of music to connect across divides, define an era and thrill the soul.

PRAISE FOR DAVID MITCHELL

'A thrilling and gifted writer'

Financial Times

'Dizzyingly, dazzlingly good'

Daily Mail

'Mitchell is, clearly, a genius'

New York Times Book Review

'An author of extraordinary ambition and skill'

Independent on Sunday

'A superb storyteller'

The New Yorker

Reviews

A great book! I was completely engrossed for two days.

With his huge electric brain, Mitchell has written his own solo scenius, one that draws connections between Edo-era Japan and a distant, post-human-collapse future. It's a grand project, brilliantly executed and deeply humanist. Utopia Avenue is the most fun stop along the way and aptly named. - Los Angeles Times

A book bristling with pleasures . . . An overwhelmingly vivid - and equally exhilarating - portrait of an era when the future seemed likely to be shaped by a combination of young people and music. At the same time, there's a melancholy sense of the transience of this idealism . . . Utopia Avenue confirms that his real talent - perhaps even genius - lies in finding wildly entertaining new ways to tell old truths. - Spectator

An ambitious, rambunctious, hugely enjoyable tale . . . [it] is filled with sparkling dialogue and has stimulating things to say about creativity, mental health, the effects of domestic violence, the Vietnam War, grief, parental responsibility and what it was perhaps like to be an independent-minded female musician back in the day. Above all, Mitchell pulls off this bold attempt at a novel exploring the undefinable mysteries of music and why music has such an impact on people. - Independent

Superb . . . enormous fun . . . a celebratory page-turner. - Literary Review

[Mitchell] tells a linear tale and eschews literary pirouetting to create a set of characters and recreate a period with . . . [such] superb believability . . . Gig upon gig conjures that danger and euphoria of the live experience of amplified sound . . . Mitchell rescues this brief slice of the past, made so poignant because its brilliance was so ephemeral, and brings it into the shimmering present. The result is that Utopia Avenue does what music does: it joins up time. - Daily Telegraph

Mitchell is expert at excavating the seams of loss, ambition and mere chance that lie under the edifice of fame . . . The reader is impelled from the first by a kind of rushing, gleeful energy . . . a supremely readable novel, if the quality of readability is taken to be one which is difficult to achieve and a relief to encounter. - Guardian

What makes it a stand-out triumph is the vibrant flair with which it recreates an era, the acuteness with which it explores composition and performance, and its often witty verbal finesse. - Sunday Times

Author Bio

David Mitchell 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 World Fantasy Award, and the John Llewellyn Rhys, Geoffrey Faber Memorial and South Bank Show Literature Prizes, among others. In 2018, he won the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, given in recognition of a writer's entire body of work. His screenwriting credits include the TV shows Pachinko and Sense8, and the movie Matrix: Resurrections.

In addition, David Mitchell together with KA Yoshida has translated from Japanese two autism memoirs by Naoki Higashida: The Reason I Jump and Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight.

He lives in Ireland.