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It’s called Utopia Avenue and it’s set in the late 60s music scene.

Dr Marinus shows up again. Is he the Nick Fury of the Mitchellverse? And the guitarist’s name is Jasper de Zoet. While waiting for Utopia Avenue to arrive in local bookstores, review Mitchell’s earlier novels.

My favorite David Mitchell books

1. Cloud Atlas
2. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
3. Black Swan Green
4. Ghostwritten
5. The Bone Clocks
6. number9dream
7. Slade House

It’s David Mitchell Week! What’s your favorite David Mitchell novel?

I got an advance copy! Thank you, Jenny!

David Mitchell’s novels are meant to be seized inky and hot from the printing presses and devoured inside a blanket fort, huddled with the cats and/or dogs, snacks within reach. Might as well finish it at once, or spend days sneaking off to read a chapter and getting nothing else done.

So far: Guitarist Jasper de Zoet is a descendant of Jacob from Thousand Autumns. There is a rare album of The Cloud Atlas Sextet by Robert Frobisher, featuring T. Tykwer (who co-directed the much-maligned Cloud Atlas movie that I enjoyed very much because it was it was not what I had expected). David Bowie turns up and makes a joke about the initials JZ.

Do not fret, Utopia Avenue should arrive in stores in a few weeks. (I hear the new books travel by sea.) Meanwhile, I’ll be in the blanket fort with book, cats, snacks. (Good thing it’s raining).

* * * * *

When I read Cloud Atlas for the first time, I resolved to read everything its author had written and would ever write. This is not a unique experience. Many writers are admired, but David Mitchell is loved. (Not stanned, thankfully—we’re not interested in his private life.) His books have a sense of wonder. His voice is that of a young person, tested but not defeated by life, setting off on a great adventure. The novels are full of emotional highs and lows—despair giving way to relief, sorrow to gladness, love to disenchantment. You can tell that the writer is actually enjoying himself. In Utopia Avenue he is practically giddy with delight at recreating the era of rock n’ roll, psychedelia, experimentation, sexual liberation, and protest.

In London in the 1960s, four people of wildly different backgrounds are brought together by the only totally honest and decent manager alive, to form a band. I’ll refrain from spoilers and just say that many, many things happen. Real people from music and art (from David Bowie to Francis Bacon to Janis Joplin) turn up and make pithy statements. The prose is ever propulsive, sometimes show-offy and sometimes clunky (“stoned on the dope of art” yikes), but always vibrating with the thrill of discovering something for the first time, even when it’s not exactly new. The songs wafting from radios inside the novel are the greatest hits of the era—I feel purists quivering to complain about the playlist, but if it gets younger readers interested in Pink Floyd and co, why the hell not.

Mitchell glides easily in and out of the slipstream, which is how he’s avoided being placed in the Science Fiction & Fantasy box. (I love SF&F, but many great writers have been denied a wider audience because of that box.) Characters from his previous novels appear: remember the non-corporeal entity in Ghostwritten? There are long passages that attempt to describe the band’s music, a valiant attempt given that the novel contains that quote, all together now: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” It doesn’t always work (“The drummer calls up an earthquake from a mile down…”), but that is the point: reaching for the indescribable. Also known as “trying to sound like Lester Bangs”—look him up.

We’ll take even the stuff that borders on cliché because David Mitchell has made us fall in love with the band. The characters become our friends and we have a stake in their happiness. We become Utopia Avenue’s fans and we want them to make it big (while mocking the late adopters). Like many of us, Mitchell is nostalgic for an era he has no personal memory of, though he’s still living in our time and cannot resist a dig at President Bone Spurs.

I dropped everything to read this novel. It’s wonderful, it was worth it, and I’d read it again.