The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet...spins fresh creatures from a prodigious creative DNA. From some angles it looks a more conventional novel of historical events (and pseudo-events) than its forerunners. Yet it invites us to think and feel about a clash, or convergence, of civilisations in a fierce new light....In 1799, at the turn of Europe's century, the Dutch trading concession of Dejima is in decline. This "high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island" in Nagasaki harbour has for 150 years given the foreigner-shunning Japan of the Tokugawa Shogunate its "sole window on the world". Yet the powers that be in Edo have cut the copper quota that the Dutch must export to keep their ailing colony of Batavia in Java afloat...On this European island at the lip of an insular empire, pickled as if in a "specimen jar" by its isolationism, young Jacob de Zoet from Domburg works as a clerk. He nurses ambitions for a higher post to match his nous and brain. Caught between worlds, in a trademark Mitchell limbo, Jacob learns the sciences of the West from his polymathic mentor, the sceptic Dr Marinus. A scion of the Ogawa clan of official translators gives him an entrée to the arts of Japan. Meanwhile, his fascination for the pioneer midwife Orito makes Jacob's urge to cross lines and find links a visceral as much as a cerebral mission...With a touch of Umberto Eco as well as his acknowledged debt to Haruki Murakami (we even meet a magic cat), Mitchell unspools his winding plot with a zesty relish for genre-fiction tricks and treats. A shocking kidnap; a rescue raid (led by a masterless samurai); a secret scroll; a hunt through dark passageways; a ghastly crime concealed behind ritual and superstition: the House of Sisters that claims Orito and her birthing skills is stacked to the rafters with storytelling booty. - Reviewed in The Guardian

To open a bookshop that would offer not the latest best-sellers but the best fiction of all time - "nothing but good novels" (and a few other volumes) that have won the hearts and minds of readers of all decades in several countries - this is the dream of the socially dissimilar but literarily well-matched man (Van) and woman (Francesca) who are the prime movers in French author Laurence Cossé's marvelous and stimulating "A Novel Bookstore"…Cossé, who has written plays and journalism as well as several previous novels (and whose French text is translated with elegance here by novelist Alison Anderson), has constructed "A Novel Bookstore" in a clever way: The book begins with descriptions of the committee members' menacings, provoking a reader's quick interest and sympathy. Then follows the booksellers' lengthy interview with a sympathetic police inspector, in which the history of their individual lives and mutual enterprise is told. After that, the rest of the plot unfolds. Several mysteries are plumbed, if not necessarily solved, in this most engaging and winning novel, whose cast of concerned characters also includes a younger woman dancing in and out of Van's existence, and an estranged husband whose intentions toward Francesca's business venture are never clear. Is true love meant to be inevitable, or bound to be unrequited? How does one define success? What will result from that police inspector's inquiries? And who is the omniscient "I" narrating this book?  - Reviewed in SFChronicle