David Mitchell Books

A rare and important insight into the mind of an autistic child, in his own words. Translated by and with a moving introduction from the award-winning author of CLOUD ATLAS, David Mitchell

An anthology collected from four centuries of travel writing about Spain and presented with a linking text by David Mitchell. Authors quoted include Casanova, the Duke of Wellington, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Graves, Evelyn Waugh, George Melly and Jan Morris.

This guide is designed to help the reader get more out of karate. It covers core skills, drills and tactics of the sport.

This will be the most refreshing, entertaining history of England you'll have ever read. Certainly, the funniest. Because David Mitchell will explain how it is not all names, dates or ungraspable historical headwinds, but instead show how it's really just a bunch of random stuff that happened with a few lucky bastards ending up on top. Some of these bastards were quite strange, but they were in charge, so we quite literally lived, and often still live, by their rules. It's a great story. And it's our story. If you want to know who we are in modern Britain, you need to read this book.

A fascinating and authoritative source of information on all of the major martial arts.Explanation of the principal characteristics and key techniques of the different disciplines.Over 300 action-packed photographs including step-by-step sequences.

Impressions of four centuries of foreign travellers in Spain. Outrageous, adoring, insulting, libellous, passionate, hilarious, thoughtful, bigoted eloquent remarks.

Ghostwritten is a novel set at the fugitive edges of Asia and Europe, and features a host of characters. A Mongolian gangster, a redundant English spy in Petersburg with a knack for forgery, a ghostwriter and a late night DJ all have tales to tell.

1799, Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor. Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk, has a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor and midwife to the city's powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken--the consequences of which will extend beyond Jacob's worst imaginings.

By the author of THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET, David Mitchell's bestselling and Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, one of Richard & Judy's 100 Books of the Decade, CLOUD ATLAS has now been adapted for film. The major motion picture, directed by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer, stars Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon, Jim Sturgess, Ben Whishaw, Jim Broadbent and Hugh Grant. The novel features six characters in interlocking stories, each interrupting the one before it: a reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan's California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified dinery server on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation. The narrators of CLOUD ATLAS hear each other's echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changes in ways great and small. Mitchell's other novels are GHOSTWRITTEN, BLACK SWAN GREEN and NUMBER9DREAM, all published by Sceptre. www.sceptrebooks.com Facebook: Sceptre Books Twitter: SceptreBooks

From award-winning writer David Mitchell comes a sinewy, meditative novel of boyhood on the cusp of adulthood and the old on the cusp of the new. Black Swan Green tracks a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the thirteen chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy. A world of Kissingeresque realpolitik enacted in boys’ games on a frozen lake; of “nightcreeping” through the summer backyards of strangers; of the tabloid-fueled thrills of the Falklands War and its human toll; of the cruel, luscious Dawn Madden and her power-hungry boyfriend, Ross Wilcox; of a certain Madame Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, an elderly bohemian emigré who is both more and less than she appears; of Jason’s search to replace his dead grandfather’s irreplaceable smashed watch before the crime is discovered; of first cigarettes, first kisses, first Duran Duran LPs, and first deaths; of Margaret Thatcher’s recession; of Gypsies camping in the woods and the hysteria they inspire; and, even closer to home, of a slow-motion divorce in four seasons. Pointed, funny, profound, left-field, elegiac, and painted with the stuff of life, Black Swan Green is David Mitchell’s subtlest and most effective achievement to date.