Random House Inc
Price: $26.00
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DAVID MITCHELL
reads from
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
$5 tickets will go on sale starting Mon., June 21
Harvard Book Store is excited to welcome acclaimed British novelist DAVID MITCHELL for a reading from his most recent work, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the “high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island” that is the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay; the farthest outpost of the war-ravaged Dutch East Indies Company; and a de facto prison for the dozen foreigners permitted to live and work there. To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, costly courtesans, earthquakes, and typhoons comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiancée back in Holland.
But Jacob’s original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor and midwife to the city’s powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken. The consequences will extend beyond Jacob’s worst imaginings. As one cynical colleague asks, “Who ain’t a gambler in the glorious Orient, with his very life?” "This is probably Mitchell’s most accessible book. It runs to almost 500 pages, yet almost every sentence shimmers with precise, opaque and brilliantly realised writing.... An historical saga on a deliberately grand scale, it never loses its quiet intimacy and is a brilliantly realised account of two worlds, conjoined by trade and desperate to shut each other out, linked by one tiny wooden bridge that in turn is spanned by the moral stubbornness of a clerk with a hidden Psaltery." —The Irish Times "With a touch of Umberto Eco as well as his acknowledged debt to Haruki Murakami (we even meet a magic cat), Mitchell unspools his winding plot with a zesty relish for genre-fiction tricks and treats.... However densely charted and richly sketched, this sumptuous imbroglio never drags. Its author often risks high-level pastiche but writes with such invigorating edge and dash that scarcely a sentence stands idle." —The Independent (UK)
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CONTACT:
General Info:
617.661.1515
Media:
617.661.1424 ex.1
Email:
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| DATE: |
Monday, July 12th |
| TIME: |
6:00 PM |
| LOCATION: |
Brattle Theatre
40 Brattle Street
Cambridge |
| TICKETS: |
$5 tickets will go ON SALE STARTING MONDAY, JUNE 21, and will be available for purchase online at harvard.com, at Harvard Book Store, and over the phone with a credit card (617.661.1515).
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David Mitchell is the acclaimed author of the novels Black Swan Green, which was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by Time; Cloud Atlas, which was a Man Booker Prize finalist; Number9Dream, which was short-listed for the Man Booker as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; and Ghostwritten, awarded the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for best book by a writer under thirty-five and short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. He lives in Ireland.
Photo Credit: Paul Stuart
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