Search Images Maps Play YouTube News Gmail Drive More »
My library | Help | Advanced Book Search | Web History | Sign in

Books

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet:

A Novel
Front Cover
33 Reviews
Random House Publishing Group, Jun 29, 2010 - Fiction - 479 pages

From the author of Cloud Atlas, now a major motion picture starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon, and Hugh Grant, and directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer

BONUS: This edition contains a discussion guide for The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay. To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, and costly courtesans comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiancée back in Holland. But Jacob’s original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured midwife to the city’s powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken—the consequences of which will extend beyond Jacob’s worst imaginings.

Look for special features inside. Join the Circle for author chats and more.

What people are saying - Write a review

User ratings

5 stars
14
4 stars
12
3 stars
5
2 stars
2
1 star
0

Review: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

User Review  - Shari - Goodreads

“A Thousand Autumns…” The title of this book is quite a giveaway: a thousand autumns… a thousand disappointments, heartbreaks, tears. And Jacob de Zoet's story – of the years he spends in Japan in ... Read full review

Review: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

User Review  - Cecily - Goodreads

A good, and exhaustively researched historical novel, but I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as any of Mitchell's others, despite a life-and-death opening. Indeed, life and death is a continuing theme ... Read full review

All 31 reviews »

Related books

Other editions - View all

About the author (2010)

David Mitchell is the author of the international bestseller The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, named a best book of the year by Time, The Washington Post, Financial Times, The New Yorker, The Globe and Mail, and The New York Times; Black Swan Green, which was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by Time; Cloud Atlas, which was a Man Booker Prize finalist; Number9Dream, which was short-listed for the Man Booker as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; and Ghostwritten, awarded the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for best book by a writer under thirty-five and short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. Hailed as “the novelist who’s shown us fiction’s future” by The Washington Post, Mitchell was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time in 2007. He lives in Ireland with his wife and two children.


From the Hardcover edition.

Bibliographic information