David Mitchell - number9dream

Whee! number9dream is a real trip - one thing about Mitchell, he sure can write. Sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, chapter after chapter, it's all effortlessly readable, no matter which new voice he may have adopted at the time (taken as a whole, too, it's impressively different from Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green, both of them seriously accomplished novels and great reads in their own right); Eiji Miyake is a tremendously engaging main character and narrator, and it's his development as much as his voice which provides the thread holding it all together amidst the crazy flights of fancy (some of which turn out to be not so fanciful after all - or do they?) and nightmarish excursions into the Tokyo underworld (Kafkaesque, with a heavy dose of Blue Velvet - although, and there's no getting away from it, the most obvious reference point is really Murakami). Mitchell's a real talent, and I can't wait to read more of his stuff.