Product Description

David Mitchell comes home - to England, 1982, and the cusp of adolescence. Jason Taylor is 13, doomed to be growing up in the most boring family in the deadest village ("Black Swan Green") in the dullest county (Worcestershire) in the most tedious nation (England) on earth. And he stammers. 13 chapters, each as self-contained as a short story, follow 13 months in his life as he negotiates the pitfalls of school and home and contends with bullies, girls and family politics. In the distance, the Falklands conflict breaks out; close at hand, the village mobilises against a gypsy camp. And through Jason's eyes, we see what he doesn't know he knows - and watch unfold what will make him wish his life had been as uneventful as he had believed. Vividly capturing the mood of the times - high unemployment, Cold War politics and the sunset of agrarian England - this is at once a portrait of an era and of an age: the black hole between childhood and teenagerdom.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #123999 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 371 pages

Review
"* 'His wildest ride yet... a singular achievement, from an author of extraordinary ambition and skill' - Independent on Sunday on CLOUD ATLAS * 'Exceptional... clever, unusual, gripping and beautifully written' - Literary Review on NUMBER9DREAM * 'The best first novel I have read in ages... [it] beguiles, informs, shocks and captivates.' - William Boyd, Daily Telegraph Books of the Year on GHOSTWRITTEN"

Daily Mail
'David Mitchell is dizzyingly, dazzlingly good...Black Swan Green is just gorgeous'

Sunday Express
‘A delight to read from beginning to end’

Customer Reviews

Black Swan Green
Anyone who is a fan of David Mitchell (and even those who have not read him) will love this book. However, don't expect the style of his previous books: Number 9 Dream, Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten. This is the story of a year in the rather eventful life of Jason Taylor, a boy of 13 growing up in a village called Black Swan Green, Worcestershire, in the early 1980s. Jason, apart from being quite a normal 13 year old, is a stammerer who tries desperately hard to hide his 'secret' from the rest of his schoolmates. His story of his experiences at school is one that anyone who was a teenager can identify with: how he sees his parents, the teachers, bullies, and those strange creatures called girls. But what makes this teenage narrative come alive, what makes you feel like you are there with Jason Taylor is the often brutal honesty with which he tells his truth. He says all the things you thought about as a teenager growing up but didn't dare to articulate. Mitchell also manages to evoke a nostalgia for the 1980s, and his detailing is superb. You remember how you or your parents or friends felt during the recession, or the public mood during the Falklands War. And there is also a nice touch where Mitchell quite unexpectedly introduces a character from one of his stories in Cloud Atlas.

The English countryside and village life is portrayed without the slightest hint of romanticism. A teenage boy doesn't see life like that. This is life in the raw. Jason sees the often brutal contests between boys to establish a pecking order, he is afraid of being ridiculed or beaten up after school, he worries about his status among the rest of the kids and he wonders if he will ever have a girlfriend. Life for young Jason Taylor is very serious indeed. In Black Swan Green, Mitchell makes a rather unpromising subject tense and fascinating. And it's a real pageturner -- you just have to know what happens next. Just buy this book!

Pure reading pleasure
David Mitchell deserves awards for his writing because he must be the finest author around. Black Swan Green takes you through a year in the life of thirteen-year-old boy in a typical English village in 1982. His references to events of the time, in particular the Falklands War take you back as you read. It does help that Jason Taylor is a very likeable, intelligent and yet vulnerable boy, being afflicted with a stammer, and the book is very painful to read at times as he suffers that most bleak and hurtful thing, bullying. I'd recently read Cloud Atlas which was a brilliant but quite difficult read and I knew this book was a lot easier but I was surprised that he even linked this book to Cloud Atlas through the amazing and surreal Madame Crommelynck daughter of Vyvyan Ayrs and who was the unrequited love of the tragic Robert Frobisher. Overall this book is an absolute 'must' read, as good as 'Catcher in the Rye'.

Nearly a triumph
Not quite an unqualified eulogy from me although I enjoyed reading it immensely hence the 4 stars. Mitchell sets out to convince us this is 1982 by loading the period references to an alarming - even excessive - degree; typically no opportunity is passed to give precise details of a meal, pop tune, clothes or whatever in order to re-emphasise that this is 1982, and this occasionally leads to clunky dialogue or stilted prose, eg when an adult refers laboriously to "Kay's Catalogues in Worcester" (a person would simply have referred to "Kays") or when Jason himself points out that the sweets from the jar in the shop come served up in paper bags (as they always were back then - in 1982 you wouldn't think to point it out). The artificial overloading of period data inevitably leads to the occasional factual error, which also grates with a reader if he or she happens to spot them. One or two other plot devices fail - we know the young sailor is serving on HMS Coventry so we can guess immediately what his fate will be. I felt he could have been put on a lesser known ship with more devastating impact (Who remembers now the ships that took hits and casualties but were not lost, like HMS Glamorgan?) The scene in which the young sailor had nightmares about combat before the Task Force was even dreamt about were overdramatised and silly - until the actual conflict and the inevitability of combat loomed he would have had no more fear of the terror of war than his former schoolfriends - The navy was just about the safest place to be until May 1982. A fact that annoys revisionist historians and some authors is that back in 1982 support for the Task Force (and for Margaret Thatcher) was extremely high - but most adults in the story here regard her as a warmonger and a barbarian and only the kids are excited by the news footage. Thatcher may have been reviled elsewhere but in Middle England where this story is set she was Brittania personified.
Having said all this what works so well about this book and what ultimately redeems it is the beautifully observed capture of the politics and issues of a young adolescent boy at school and of a middle class family in turmoil - things which paradoxically have hardly changed at all in the intervening 25 years. I'd recommend this book.