A metaphysical thriller, a meditation on mortality and a chronicle of our self-devouring times - from the masterful David Mitchell.
Teenage runaway Holly Sykes encounters a strange woman who offers a small kindness in exchange for 'asylum'. Despite flashes of precognition and brief lapses in the laws of reality, decades will pass before Holly fully understands exactly what sort of asylum the woman was seeking. For Holly Sykes - daughter, sister, mother, guardian - is also an unwitting player in a murderous feud played out in the shadows and margins of our world, and may yet prove to be its decisive weapon.
"As ever, Mitchell writes a crunchily grounded, bitingly Anglo-Saxon prose that somehow makes room for the supernatural, as if D. H. Lawrence were reborn for the digital age … Not many novelists could take on plausible Aboriginal speech, imagine a world after climate change has ravaged it and wonder whether whales suffer from unrequited love...Other writers may be more moving, and some may push deeper, but very few excite the reader about both the visceral world and the visionary one as Mitchell does." - Pico Iyer, The New York Times Sunday Book Review
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 John Llewellyn Rhys, Geoffrey Faber Memorial and South Bank Show Literature Prizes, among others, and has been named a Granta Best Young British Novelist.