Black Swan Green

Longlisted for the Booker Prize

By: David Mitchell

Narrated by: Kristopher Milnes

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The dazzling novel from critically-acclaimed David Mitchell.

Shortlisted for the 2006 Costa Novel Award
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2006

January, 1982. Thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor - covert stammerer and reluctant poet - anticipates a stultifying year in his backwater English village. But he hasn't reckoned with bullies, simmering family discord, the Falklands War, a threatened gypsy invasion and those mysterious entities known as girls. Charting thirteen months in the black hole between childhood and adolescence, this is a captivating novel, wry, painful and vibrant with the stuff of life.

(P) 2020 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd©2006 David Mitchell

Critic reviews

Black Swan Green's 'I love 1982' nostalgia is a glassy, pitch-perfect, mock-innocent surface through which something rotten might appear (Ali Smith)

The everyday details of Jason's life are lyrically transformed by the power of Mitchell's prose, which is beguiling, funny, beautifully poetic and always keenly observed. Black Swan Green is just gorgeous

Mitchell has written another complex novel, in which multiple themes run like streams of extra data beneath every incident, and understanding comes by the process of reading into a satisfying tangle of metaphor and reference. It is the best kind of contemporary fiction (M. John Harrison)

Hugely touching and enjoyable

A delight to read from beginning to end

Luminously beautiful . . . It celebrates the liberating power of language while reviewing without bitterness or resentment the role that inarticulacy, shyness, even bullying, might play in shaping the future career of a writer (Ruth Scurr)

Spry, disconcerting and moving. It is also extremely funny even - or especially - at the blackest of moments

A pitch-perfect study of a time and a place

David Mitchell's beautiful novel of growing up and learning to accept the fragility of the world shows he can do subtle, slow and moving every bit as well as he did dazzling and mind-boggling in the past works (Kazuo Ishiguro)

What is so impressive about Black Swan Green . . . is how entirely the formal artifice accommodates a naturalistic, and a thoroughly felt, story about human beings. Black Swan Green is, as its protagonist would put it, ace (Sam Leith)

All the drama and inadvertent comedy of the onset of adolescence are brilliantly laid bare . . . a deceptively easy read, at times uproariously funny

Playful and inventive, Mitchell stretches language and ideas with exuberant abandon . . . he inhabits the mind of his troubled teenager with spellbinding conviction

A very fine and tightly structured novel . . . Mitchell pulls off a beautifully ironic piece of ventriloquism; the narrator's voice is pitched perfectly and entirely credibly, the dialogue never falters (William Wall)

Intricate and beautiful

Alternately nostalgic, funny and heartbreaking . . . Mitchell has a perfect ear for that most calamitous year, the first of the teens, when we come face-to-face with the volatile nature of life

Brilliant . . . In Jason, Mitchell creates an evocative yet authentically adolescent voice, an achievement even more impressive than the ventriloquism of his earlier books