David Mitchell was born in 1969 and his first novel, Ghostwritten, was published by Sceptre in 1999 to great acclaim and won the Mail on Sunday / John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. His second novel, Number9dream (2001) was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He was chosen as one of Granta's 20 Best Young British Novelists 2003.
The Broken Places (2023) Russell Franklin "Sunlit and dark, painful and joyous, The Broken Places follows Ernest Hemingway's child on a lifelong journey. Russell Franklin has crafted a myth-busting novel of rare skill and integrity. Its echoes persist and evolve long after the final pages."
The Mountain in the Sea (2022) Ray Nayler "I loved this novel's brain and heart, its hidden traps, sheer propulsion, ingenious world-building and the purity of its commitment to luminous ideas."
I Was the President's Mistress!! (2022) Miguel Syjuco "A super-typhoon of a novel. A Babel of rogues, survivors and shape-shifters. A polemic against corruption and greed. A sassy, swerving mini-series, touched by grace and beauty. A Filipino Bonfire of the Vanities for our beleaguered times. An uncompromising work of art."
The Book of Form and Emptiness (2021) Ruth Ozeki "This compassionate novel of life, love and loss glows in the dark. Its strange, beautiful pages turn themselves. If you’ve lost your way with fiction over the last year or two, let The Book of Form and Emptiness light your way home."
The Island of Missing Trees (2021) Elif Shafak "A wise novel of love and grief, roots and branches, displacement and home, faith and belief. THE ISLAND OF MISSING TREES is balm for our bruised times."
Piranesi (2020) Susanna Clarke "What a world Susanna Clarke conjures into being, what a tick-tock-tick-tock of reveals, what a pure protagonist, what a morally squalid supporting cast, what beauty, tension and restraint, and what a pitch-perfect ending. Piranesi is an exquisite puzzle-box far, far bigger on the inside than it is on the outside."
Waste Tide (2019) Chen Qiufan "An accomplished eco-techno-thriller with heart and soul."
Census (2018) Jesse Ball "Census is a vital testament to selfless love; a psalm to commonplace miracles; and a mysterious evolving metaphor. So kind, it aches."
All Involved (2015) (All Involved) Ryan Gattis "A symphonic, pitch-perfect, superlative novel. It is visceral and adrenalin-fuelled, yet tender and even darkly comic. It is audacious, unflinching and subversive. It doesn't judge. It swallowed me whole."
Stay Up With Me (2013) Tom Barbash "Tom Barbash's wise and bittersweet stories map the gulfs between us, and the unexpected connections."
The Buried Giant (2012) Kazuo Ishiguro "If forced at knife-point to choose my favourite Ishiguro novel, I’d opt for The Buried Giant. It uses the tropes of fantasy to set up a smoke-screen which the book then, by twists and turns, dispels. This reveal gives the book a shadow-plot, and layers of mystery . . . An ideas-enabler, a metaphor-animator."
(b.1969)
