Celebrating the power of music to connect across divides, define an era and thrill the soul, Utopia Avenue is the spectacular new novel from the bestselling author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell.
Utopia Avenue might be the most curious British band you’ve never heard of. The band produced only two albums in two years, yet their musical legacy lives on.
Emerging from London’s psychedelic scene in 1967, folksinger Elf Holloway, blues bassist Dean Moss, guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet and jazz drummer Griff Griffin together created a unique sound, with lyrics that captured their turbulent times.
This is the story of Utopia Avenue’s brief, blazing journey from Soho clubs and draughty ballrooms to the promised land of America, just when the ‘Summer of Love’ was receding into something much darker.
A multi-faceted tale of dreams, drugs, love, sexuality, madness and grief – of stardom’s wobbly ladder and fame’s Faustian pact – and of the collision between youthful idealism and jaded reality as the Sixties drew to a close.
“The great rock and roll novel – an epic love letter to the greatest music ever made and the book the music has always deserved.” – Tony Parsons
David Mitchell is the author of the novels Ghostwritten, number9dream, Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, The Bone Clocks and Slade House. He has been shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize, won the John Llewellyn Rhys, Geoffrey Faber Memorial and South Bank Show Literature Prizes among others, and been named a Granta Best Young British Novelist. In 2018, he won the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, given in recognition of a writer’s entire body of work.
In addition, David Mitchell together with KA Yoshida has translated from Japanese two books by Naoki Higashida – The Reason I Jump: One Boy’s Voice from the Silence of Autism and Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight: A Young Man’s Voice from the Silence of Autism.
Utopia Avenue is published by Hachette Australia and is available from all leading book retailers including Dymocks.
Image: Utopia Avenue – courtesy of Hachette Australia