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Ghostwritten
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David Mitchell's debut novel Ghostwritten is a relay race across the globe with nine narrators in nine locations unwittingly intersecting space and fate. The stories travel from Okinawa to Tokyo, Hong Kong, a holy mountain in China, Mongolia, St. Petersburg, London, Ireland, and New York before returning to Tokyo in a roll-back-the-clocks moment that bears witness to our leadoff narrator bombing a subway with Sarin nerve gas. In each case, Mitchell has conjured distinct and vivid voices for characters as disparate as a love struck jazz aficionado, a doomed and loutish bond trader, the elderly proprietor of a tea shack and a genius physicist capable of coding impotence into nuclear bombs. With barely a glimmer of the lives they influence, the characters participate in a chain of events that reflect the world as we know it from the headlines, from the Discovery Channel, and from other books in voices distinct and alive. The chapters loop and inter-link just enough to gather these stories into a detailed and entertainingly wrought question of chance and subsequence.
--Catherine McWeeney |
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