Book Review: Ghostwritten, by David Mitchell

A body-hopping, scene-jumping first novel that's still pretty good.

Sceptre, 1999, 436 pages

Oblivious to the bizarre ways in which their lives intersect, nine characters - a terrorist in Okinawa, a record-shop clerk in Tokyo, a money-laundering British financier in Hong Kong, an old woman running a tea shack in China, a transmigrating "noncorpum" entity seeking a human host in Mongolia, a gallery-attendant-cum-art-thief in Petersburg, a drummer in London, a female physicist in Ireland, and a radio deejay in New York - hurtle toward a shared destiny of astonishing impact. Like the book's one non-human narrator, Mitchell latches onto his host characters and invades their lives with parasitic precision, making Ghostwritten a sprawling and brilliant literary relief map of the modern world.

( Mitchell's first novel has many of the same ingredients as Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks )

Verdict: This was a good book and anyone who has enjoyed Mitchell's other books will enjoy this one, but I would not say it's required reading unless you really want to read everything by him. 7/10

Also by David Mitchell: My reviews of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Cloud Atlas, and The Bone Clocks.

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My complete list of book reviews.