![]() ![]() Each chapter takes the title of a song and recounts the events that inspired that song. Each of the novel’s six parts represents one side of the band’s three LP records. It ends in San Francisco during the autumn of ’68 with a tragic but utterly random catastrophe. The band begins in London, as a musical blind date engineered by Levon Frankland (himself from The Bone Clocks), who is here a nattily dressed Canadian clearly modeled on Beatles manager Brian Epstein. The overarching plot of Utopia Avenue is one long climb. He lives in Ireland with his wife and two children.An irony of Mitchell’s work is that the more overtly he strives for fantasy, the less magical his fiction becomes. With KA Yoshida, Mitchell translated from the Japanese Naoki Higashida's internationally bestselling memoir The Reason I Jump. Twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Mitchell was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME magazine. Prodigiously skilled and gloriously ambitious." - Toronto StarĭAVID MITCHELL is the award-winning and bestselling author of Slade House, The Bone Clocks, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Black Swan Green, Cloud Atlas, Number9Dream, and Ghostwritten. ![]() "Astonishing, moving effortlessly from elegant genre fiction to satire to high-end literary pyrotechnics. As in the works of Thomas Pynchon and Herman Melville, one feels the roof of the narrative lifted off and oneself in thrall." - Time "If David Mitchell isn't the most talented novelist of his generation, is there any doubt that he is the most multi-talented?" - The Atlantic "No writer alive seems to be having as much fun as Mitchell." - The Globe and Mail "A genre-bending, time-leaping, world-traveling, puzzle-making, literary magician." - Esquire He writes as though at the helm of some perpetual dream machine, can evidently do anything." - The New York Times Book Review "To open a Mitchell book is to set forth on an adventure." - The Boston Globe This is Mitchell at his best." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) delivering more fun, more mischief, and more heart than ever before. ![]() "Mitchell's magical, much anticipated latest is a rollicking, rapturous tale of 1960s rock 'n' roll. "Expect prose that's as electric as the music." - Kirkus Reviews rock ‘n' roll road trip whose characters and narrative become the song that gets stuck in your head." - USA Today Utopia Avenue is a fun and fulfilling read. Mitchell marvelously brings it all to life by focusing his most engaging storytelling on each band member's own evolution, along with some experimental narrative and exceptional in-concert scenes. . The book is most alive and most compelling when Mitchell slips the surly bonds of the realist premise and lands in his own extraordinary imagined worlds." - The Guardian "Mitchell superbly conveys the energy and spirit of the age. Utopia Avenue brilliantly explores this theme." - Los Angeles Review of Books "Now, more than ever, it seems vital to examine the various ways that our lives are densely interconnected rather than isolated and separate. "Mitchell's rich imaginative stews bubble with history and drama, and this time the flavour is a blend of Carnaby Street and Chateau Marmont." - The Washington Post Making your way through this novel feels like riding a high-end convertible down Hollywood Boulevard on the prettiest day of the year while luminaries wave to you from the sidewalks." - Slate ![]() Mitchell's prose is suppler and richer than ever, and his ability to conjure a historical milieu he never actually experienced does not falter. Utopia Avenue is, page by page, a sheer pleasure to read. Can we really change the world, or does the world change us? Emerging from London's psychedelic scene in 1967, and fronted by folk singer Elf Holloway, blues bassist Dean Moss and guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet, Utopia Avenue embarked on a meteoric journey from the seedy clubs of Soho, a TV debut on Top of the Pops, the cusp of chart success, glory in Amsterdam, prison in Rome and a fateful American sojourn in the Chelsea Hotel, Laurel Canyon, and San Francisco during the autumn of '68.ĭavid Mitchell's kaleidoscopic novel tells the unexpurgated story of Utopia Avenue's turbulent life and times of fame's Faustian pact and stardom's wobbly ladder of the families we choose and the ones we don't of voices in the head, and the truths and lies they whisper of music, madness and idealism. Utopia Avenue may be the most extraordinary British band you've never heard of. From the internationally bestselling author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas. ![]()
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