Book description
It's a dank January in the Worcestershire village of Black Swan Green
and thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor - covert stammerer and reluctant
poet - anticipates a stultifying year in the deadest village on Earth.
But Jason hasn't reckoned with a junta of bullies, simmering family
discord, the Falklands War, an exotic Belgian émigré, a threatened
gypsy invasion and the caprices of those mysterious entities known as
girls.
David Mitchell's bewitching new novel charts thirteen months in the
black hole between childhood and adolescence, set against the sunset
of an agrarian England still overshadowed by the Cold War. Wry,
painful, funny and vibrant with the stuff of life, Black Swan
Green is his subtlest and most captivating achievement to date.
