Black Swan Green

It's a dank January in the Worcestershire village of Black Swan Green and thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor - covert stammerer and reluctant poet - anticipates a stultifying year in the deadest village on Earth. But Jason hasn't reckoned with a junta of bullies, simmering family discord, the Falklands War, an exotic of those mysterious entities know as girls. Black Swan Green charts thirteen months in the black hole between childhood and adolescence, set against the sunset of an agrarian England still overshadowed by the Cold War. Wry, painful, funny and vibrant with the stuff of life, it is David Mitchell's sublest and most captivating achievement to date.