From my list on fabulist fiction books where the real and unreal collide, leaving us questioning both.
Why am I passionate about this?
After reading The Enormous Egg as a child, I’ve been devoted to stories where the strange, the uncanny, and the magical are all elements of the worlds characters must negotiate. I’m most drawn to fiction containing seemingly unreal elements because, in my experience, that is reality. Those moments when the past suddenly feels present, or when you glimpse something at the edge of your vision that feels significant, but you can’t quite catch it. Moments when anything is possible. No surprise that I write fiction that explores those moments of uncertainty and leaves the reader unmoored, thinking about the people and their experiences long after they’ve left the book.
Kevin's book list on fabulist fiction books where the real and unreal collide, leaving us questioning both
Why did Kevin love this book?
David Mitchell’s most famous novels, Cloud Atlas, and The Bone Clocks, are incredible works of fabulist fiction, but The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is my favorite. Mitchell’s prose is stunning, and it particularly shines in this novel.
His characters, both European and Japanese, grab the reader immediately and are some of the most human, heartbreaking people I’ve met in a novel. Here, the uncanny, fantastical, and speculative elements are more subtle in telling the story of an unlikely relationship between a Dutchman and a Japanese woman during the height of the Dutch East Indies Company’s influence in the Far East.
But this is more than historical fiction. Something beyond Japan’s 18th-century strict societal mores and De Zoet’s Catholicism moves just out of view. Something mythic yet personal. Fate, gods, ghosts—we are never quite certain which, or maybe it’s all of them.
3 authors picked The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
The Sunday Times Number One Bestseller, from the author of CLOUD ATLAS and THE BONE CLOCKS.
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010
'Brilliant' - The Times
'A masterpiece' - Scotsman
Be transported to a place like no other: a tiny, man-made island in the bay of Nagasaki, for two hundred years the sole gateway between Japan and the West. Here, in the dying days of the 18th-century, a young Dutch clerk arrives to make his fortune. Instead he loses his heart.
Step onto the streets of Dejima and mingle with scheming traders, spies, interpreters, servants and concubines as two…