Ghostwritten

An employee of the Hermitage Gallery. a youthful Tokyo jazz enthusiast. An unscrupulous British attorney in Hong Kong. A Manhattan disc jockey. An Irish physicist. An old lady in a rural Chinese tea hut. A terrorist in Okinawa under the grip of a cult. an artist in London. In Mongolia, a spirit making the transition. What is the destiny or coincidental element that ties these nine individuals from nine different nations, spanning the world from east to west, together? What pattern does the passage of time and distance establish for their intertwined fates?

David Mitchell is a writer of pyrotechnic brilliance and deep compassion, a mind to whom nothing human is foreign. Through these nine interconnected pieces, Mitchell weaves genres, cultures, and ideas like a gossamer thread. These lives are connected by a multitude of factors, but fundamentally they are all driven by the same need for transcendence and connection, an axis of commonality that may go either way: toward creativity or destruction. Ghostwritten finally completes a full circle as lives collide with a terrifying symmetry. It is at this moment that a well-known concept—that the size of the earth is just a question of perspective—hits home with the impact of a brand-new realization. It is the first book written by a writer with incredible talent.