![]() ![]() It is also a favoured trait to introduce past characters into someone else’s tale. He is masterful at interlocking stories – often across continents, genres and time periods – earning him a loyal fan base. Over eight novels and counting, Mitchell has created a multiverse within his ever-expanding “über novel”. The marriage of lyrics and music can alter how you feel in life-enhancing ways and I wouldn’t want to live in a world without that.” Songs that contain different versions of yourself and songs that you play for their mood-altering properties. “The biopic of your life has its own soundtrack,” he says. “There are songs from your youth that licensed you to act and think in certain ways. Like his latest characters, music has shaped Mitchell’s life immeasurably. ![]() The novel pays homage to the 1960s’ timeless sounds as the fictional band rub shoulders with real-world artists. I noticed that long before I ever formulated it in a sentence.” “I also got pleasure from world-building, narrative building and imagining people who weren’t real. “It would have been a bit of a stretch at times to call it an aspiration, or even a daydream, but even if I couldn’t always express it, I think I’ve always had an affinity with language,” explains Mitchell, a proud patron of the British Stammering Association – an affliction he has himself suffered with throughout his life. A further six novels followed, including his seminal work Cloud Atlas, which was adapted into a motion picture starring Tom Hanks. There, he met his wife, Keiko, before writing his debut novel, Ghostwritten, which was released in 1999 and awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. He moved to Worcestershire with his family, aged six, and later graduated from Kent University with a masters in comparative literature. In 1994, after a year in Sicily, he moved to Hiroshima, Japan, where he worked as an English teacher. Mitchell was born in Ainsdale, Southport in 1969, where he has fond childhood memories of playing in the sand dunes. ![]() Utopia Avenue is in the real world – it’s an impossible thing alongside a very mundane, suburban thing, so the band and I like the name because it’s an oxymoron.” Even if by some chance you do get there, it rarely stays that utopia for long. “It’s only really a place you can glimpse, but those glimpses are crucial and without them, you are in a dystopia. “Utopia is otherworldly,” says the 51-year-old, speaking via Skype from his home in County Cork, Ireland, where he lives with his wife and two children. This vibrant yet turbulent period in modern history is the setting of Utopia Avenue, the highly anticipated new novel by Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell, in which a band of the same name climb rock stardom’s precarious ladder. You’re making your own Middle Earth, aren’t you?’”Īlthough the counterculture revolution later drew criticism, it nevertheless helped to shape the collective consciousness and proved that creating a better society was achievable. “My Canadian editor once said: ‘I know what you’re doing, Mitchell. This new era also paved the way for political protest, set to a psychedelic soundtrack featuring the likes of Cream and Pink Floyd. The capital’s downbeat post-war image was eclipsed by the bright colours of fashion and Pop Art. As San Francisco enjoyed the Summer of Love in 1967, London’s Swinging Sixties were already in motion, allowing the city’s young residents to live their utopian dream. ![]()
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