Marinus and his ilk are lurking, surfacing briefly to prompt plot turns here and there. This band’s story is embedded in our own-Jim Morrison, John Lennon, Diana Ross & the Supremes, and Sandy Denny all make appearances-but underneath it all, Dr. Mitchell’s latest novel tells the story of the stratospheric rise of a fictional British rock band named Utopia Avenue in 1960s London.

Marinus startling, but the longtime Mitchell reader breathes a sigh of relief: here we go, the weirdness has begun.

The first-timer finds the appearance of Mitchell’s immortal Dr. The first-time reader doesn’t know about the temporal pitfalls or the recurring characters. Marinus appears, time and reality stretch and then break, we sense-and sometimes even enter-a gnostic world where good and evil fight in secret, while the realist world moves forward on another plane. These mechanisms usually take the same form across Mitchell’s novels: a mysterious, gruesome figure named Dr. At moments in these books, the fiction of realism collapses, cracks, and we glimpse the horrifying mechanisms that structure the realist universe’s seeming rhythms. Running through them all is a complexly coherent system-the Mitchellverse-that blends crisp realism with dizzying forays into science fiction. There is a coming-of-age novel about a video-game obsessed adolescent in present-day Japan ( Number9Dream), a novel about a Dutch visitor to a port near Nagasaki at the very end of the eighteenth century ( The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet), a novel that deals with a widespread environmental collapse and the horror it brings to ill people ( The Bone Clocks). Each of his books stands alone, as a thoughtful, researched, realistic portrayal of a specific time or place. For every novel David Mitchell writes, two are published: there is the novel read by Mitchell’s fans, and the novel read by first-timers.

Utopia avenue book