[ book tip by Ann Morgan ] In Japan a software engineer works up to perpetrating a nerve-gas attack, in China a city banker goes AWOL, meanwhile a rogue soul bunny-hops between characters in Mongolia and, over the other side of the world, a reticent English-woman takes delivery of a Queen Anne chair. A heap of random occurrences? A selection of beautifully captured snap-shots? Or a finely-woven web of interrelated events, each necessitating the next? In the hands of David Mitchell, the most exciting British writer to emerge in the last ten years, they could hardly be anything less.

Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten, sets out themes that will colour and inform his later work. For Mitchell, humanity is a fragile, interdependent mass of beings, colliding with and influencing each other in the most extraordinary and fundamental ways. Lives led miles and even years apart echo through each other, striking resonances that challenge the empty individualism that seems to characterize much of the modern world. The result is a mesmerising and wide-ranging work that tests the possibilities of language to its limits and will urge you to read it again.

[ book info ] Mitchell, David: Ghostwritten.