Product Description

An apocalyptic cult member carries out a gas attack on a rush-hour metro, but what connects him to a jazz buff in Tokyo? A woman on a holy mountain talks to a tree - and the tree talks back - unaware of the effect the financial irregularities of a burnt-out lawyer will have on her life. Add to this a Mongolian gangster, a redundant English spy in Petersburg with a knack for forging masterpieces, a despondent 'zookeeper', a nuclear scientist, a ghostwriter, a ghost, and a late night New York DJ whose hard-boiled scepticism has been his undoing. All of them have tales to tell, and all must play their part as they are caught up in the inescapable forces of cause and effect.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8328 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
"What is real and what is not?": David Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten: A Novel in Nine Parts, plays with this question throughout its "parts". (That there are 10 sections is just part of the mystery of this book's schema.) Told through a range of voices, scattered across the globe--Tokyo, Hong Kong, Mongolia, Petersburg, London--Ghostwritten has been described as a "firework display, shooting off in a dozen different narrative directions" (Adam Lively).

Certainly, Mitchell offers his readers a vertiginous, sometimes seductive, display of persona and place. "Twenty million people live and work in Tokyo," he writes in "Okinawa", the first section in the novel. "It's so big that nobody really knows where it stops." That sense of the global extension of the (post)modern city, the networks-- cultural, technological, phantasmagoric--to which it gives rise, is one key to this story of a Japanese death cult devoted to purging the "unclean" (gas attacks on the metro). "No, in Tokyo you have to make your place inside your head": that's how this immense world gets smaller, more subjective, more mad, as the narrator, Mr Kobayashi, sheds his "old family of the skin" to join a new "family of the spirit". It's a common theme. "I'm this person, I'm this person, I'm that person, I'm that person too," chants the voice of "Hong Kong", in the second section of the book. "No wonder it's all such a fucking mess." Neal's talking about his world, his life as a Hong Kong trader--"he's a man of departments, compartments, apartments"--but he might also be describing the experience of reading Ghostwritten. At once loquacious and knowing, leisurely and frantic, Mitchell offers his readers a huge, but fragmentary, portmanteau which builds in the links between its parts--aching bodies, reality police, the "ghost" writer in the machine of contemporary life, its mad, comic, and cosmic voices--without quite convincing you that they really do come together. -- Vicky Lebeau

Review
'Demands to be read and re-read ... an astonishing debut' -- Lawrence Norfolk, Independent 'One of the best first novels I've read in a long time ... I couldn't put it down' -- AS Byatt, Mail on Sunday 'A firework display ... a remarkable novel by a young writer of remarkable talent' -- Observer 'The best first novel I have read in ages ... it beguiles, informs, shocks and captivates.' -- William Boyd, Daily Telegraph Books of the 'Fabulously atmospheric and wryly perceptive ... a huge new talent' -- Guardian Books of the Year 'The best modern novel I have read for some time' -- Rachel Cusk, Express on Sunday 'A remarkable first novel ... Eastern, ethereal, yet flecked with flashes of commando grit, this multi-faceted novel is full of surprises' -- Time Out

More of an experience that a novel, Mitchell's book's huge cast play off one another to dazzling efect. Set in the shadowlands and margins of Asia and Europe, stories intermingle with a bewildering and awe-inspiring brilliance. Ghostwritten becomes a melting pot into which are tossed a Japanese jazz fan, island cities, a Mongolian mobster, Buddha, 'The White Album', Ulan Bator's Grand Central Station and much much more. All the elements in this engrossing novel combine to form a masterpeiece which draws the reader into a world where everyone and everything has its own story to tell. (Kirkus UK)

Review
'Demands to be read and re-read . . . an astonishing debut' (Lawrence Norfolk, Independent )

'One of the best first novels I've read in a long time . . . I couldn't put it down' (AS Byatt, Mail on Sunday )

'A firework display . . . a remarkable novel by a young writer of remarkable talent' (Observer )

'The best first novel I have read in ages . . . it beguiles, informs, shocks and captivates.' (William Boyd, Daily Telegraph Books of the )

'Fabulously atmospheric and wryly perceptive . . . a huge new talent' (Guardian Books of the Year )

'The best modern novel I have read for some time' (Rachel Cusk, Express on Sunday )

'A remarkable first novel . . . Eastern, ethereal, yet flecked with flashes of commando grit, this multi-faceted novel is full of surprises' (Time Out )