****By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks and
Cloud Atlas Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
**
"A novel as accomplished as anything being written."--Newsweek
**
Number9Dream is the international literary sensation from a writer
with astonishing range and imaginative energy--an intoxicating ride
through Tokyo's dark underworlds and the even more mysterious landscapes
of our collective dreams.
David Mitchell follows his eerily precocious, globe-striding first
novel, Ghostwritten, with a work that is in its way even more
ambitious. In outward form, Number9Dream is a Dickensian coming-of-age
journey: Young dreamer Eiji Miyake, from remote rural Japan, thrust out
on his own by his sister's death and his mother's breakdown, comes to
Tokyo in pursuit of the father who abandoned him. Stumbling around this
strange, awesome city, he trips over and crosses--through a hidden
destiny or just monstrously bad luck--a number of its secret power
centers. Suddenly, the riddle of his father's identity becomes just one
of the increasingly urgent questions Eiji must answer. Why is the line
between the world of his experiences and the world of his dreams so
blurry? Why do so many horrible things keep happening to him? What is it
about the number 9? To answer these questions, and ultimately to come to
terms with his inheritance, Eiji must somehow acquire an insight into
the workings of history and fate that would be rare in anyone, much less
in a boy from out of town with a price on his head and less than the
cost of a Beatles disc to his name.
Praise for Number9Dream
"Delirious--a grand blur of overwhelming sensation."--Entertainment
Weekly
"To call Mitchell's book a simple quest novel . . is like calling Don
DeLillo's Underworld the story of a missing baseball."--The New
York Times Book Review
"Number9Dream, with its propulsive energy, its Joycean eruption of
language and playfulness, represents further confirmation that David
Mitchell should be counted among the top young novelists working
today."--San Francisco Chronicle
"Mitchell's new novel has been described as a cross between Don DeLillo
and William Gibson, and although that's a perfectly serviceable
cocktail-party formula, it doesn't do justice to this odd, fitfully
compelling work."--The New Yorker
"Leaping with ease from surrealist fables to a teenage coming-of-age
story and then spinning back to Yakuza gangster battles and World War
II-era kamikaze diaries, Mitchell is an aerial freestyle ski-jumper of
fiction. Somehow, after performing feats of literary gymnastics, he
manages to stick the landing."--The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
