Capturing a time when youthful idealism collided with jaded reality, this bewitching novel celebrates the power of music to connect across divides, define an era and thrill the soul. New York Times Book Review Editors Choice Mitchells rich imaginative stews bubble with history and drama, and this time the flavor is a blend of Carnaby. This is the story of a unique band’s brief, blazing journey from Soho dives to chart success and on to the promised land of America, just when the Summer of Love was giving way to something much darker - a tale of dreams, drugs, sexuality, madness and grief, and of fame’s pitfalls. Utopia Avenue is a treat, one that more than satisfied my expectations for a new Mitchell book - its well-written, humane, human, thoughtful, profound, comic, and just a wonderful encapsulation of life. Utopia Avenue, the band, are Edenic, in that respect. Strangers to each other and from widely different backgrounds, together they create magic. The year is 1967 and word is spreading about a new band on London’s psychedelic scene - an unlikely combination of a female folksinger, a blues bassist, a jazz drummer and an electric guitarist. David Mitchell’s kaleidoscopic novel tells the unexpurgated story of Utopia Avenue’s turbulent life and times of fame’s Faustian pact and stardom’s wobbly ladder of the families we choose and the ones we don’t of voices in the head, and the truths and lies they whisper of music, madness, and idealism.

‘ONE OF THE MOST BRILLIANTLY INVENTIVE WRITERS OF THIS, OR ANY, COUNTRY’ IndependentĪ story of music and dreams, drugs and madness, love and grief, from the acclaimed author of Cloud Atlas Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell: 9780812987218 : Books NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The long-awaited new novel from the bestselling, prize-winning author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks.

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