Introducing Utopia Avenue, the spectacular new novel from the bestselling author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell!

‘A stand-out triumph’ – The Sunday Times

‘One of the most brilliantly inventive writers of this, or any country’ – Independent

About the book

Utopia Avenue might be the most curious British band you’ve never heard of.

Emerging from London’s psychedelic scene in 1967, folksinger Elf Holloway, blues bassist Dean Moss, guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet and jazz drummer Griff Griffin together created a unique sound, with lyrics that captured their turbulent times. The band produced only two albums in two years, yet their musical legacy lives on.

This is the story of Utopia Avenue’s brief, blazing journey from Soho clubs and draughty ballrooms to the promised land of America, just when the Summer of Love was receding into something much darker – a multi-faceted tale of dreams, drugs, love, sexuality, madness and grief; of stardom’s wobbly ladder and fame’s Faustian pact; and of the collision between youthful idealism and jaded reality as the Sixties drew to a close.

Above all, this bewitching novel celebrates the power of music to connect across divides, define an era and thrill the soul.

Listen to an excerpt from the first chapter, read by Ralph Lister:

About the author

David Mitchell is the author of the novels Ghostwritten, number9dream, Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, The Bone Clocks and Slade House. He has been shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize, won the John Llewellyn Rhys, Geoffrey Faber Memorial and South Bank Show Literature Prizes among others, and been named a Granta Best Young British Novelist. In 2018, he won the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, given in recognition of a writer’s entire body of work.

Together with KA Yoshida, David has translated from Japanese two books by Naoki Higashida – The Reason I Jump: One Boy’s Voice from the Silence of Autism and Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight: A Young Man’s Voice from the Silence of Autism. He lives with his wife and their two children in Ireland.

Categories Fiction International

Tags Book excerpts Book extracts David Mitchell Jonathan Ball Publishers New books New releases Podcast Soundcloud Utopia Avenue