This is the second book by David Mitchell that I have read and loved, the first being Cloud Atlas. Black Swan Green is a coming of age story set in an English community, halfway between town and countryside, at the time of the Falklands War. To me that description sounds dull as ditchwater but the quality of Mitchell’s writing carries you through it, painting a picture of a boy who is both ordinary and extraordinary living a life that is both pedestrian but also fast-changing. Events make constant seamless switches between magical and banal until you realise that the world is not one thing or the other but inextricably both. This is a very clever writer.
Black Swan Green 4/5
