The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

From the author of Cloud Atlas, now a major motion picture starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon, and Hugh Grant, and directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer

The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the Japanese Empire's single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay. To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, and costly courtesans comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiancée back in Holland. But Jacob's original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured 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.

David Mitchell is the author of the international bestseller The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, named a best book of the year by Time, The Washington Post, Financial Times, The New Yorker, The Globe and Mail, and The New York Times; Black Swan Green, which was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by Time; Cloud Atlas, which was a Man Booker Prize finalist; Number9Dream, which was short-listed for the Man Booker as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; and Ghostwritten, awarded the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for best book by a writer under thirty-five and short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. Hailed as "the novelist who's shown us fiction's future" by The Washington Post, Mitchell was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time in 2007. He lives in Ireland.

"A page-turner...Mitchell's masterpiece; and also, I am convinced, a masterpiece of our time."-Richard Eder, The Boston Globe

"A novel of ideas, of longing, of good and evil and those who fall somewhere in between [that] confirms [David] Mitchell as one of the more fascinating and fearless writers alive."-Dave Eggers, The New York Times Book Review (front-page review)

"The novelist who's shown us fiction's future has written a classic tale...an epic of sacrificial love, clashing civilizations and enemies who won't rest until whole family lines have been snuffed out."-Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"Some of Mitchell's most luscious writing yet."-Los Angeles Times