Number9Dream

ISBN: 0812966929

Author: Mitchell, David

Condition: New

By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas Shortlisted for the Man Booker PrizeA novel as accomplished as anything being written.-NewsweekNumber9Dream is the international literary sensation from a writer with astonishing range and imaginative energy-an intoxicating ride through Tokyos 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 sisters death and his mothers 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 fathers 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 Number9DreamDelirious-a grand blur of overwhelming sensation.-Entertainment WeeklyTo call Mitchells book a simple quest novel . . is like calling Don DeLillos Underworld the story of a missing baseball.-The New York Times Book ReviewNumber9Dream, 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 ChronicleMitchells new novel has been described as a cross between Don DeLillo and William Gibson, and although thats a perfectly serviceable cocktail-party formula, it doesnt do justice to this odd, fitfully compelling work.-The New YorkerLeaping 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