There’s a lot of name-checking and scene-setting too, as characters attend Pink Floyd’s gig at the UFO club, reminisce about the heyday of the 2i’s coffee bar on Old Compton St, or check into New York’s Chelsea Hotel. A not-yet-famous David Bowie pops up now and again to tell everyone how famous he is going to be. But its Mitchell, man, he does what he wants, and I think a large portion of his fan base loves that he doesnt limit himself solely to realism. It’s also studded with clunking cameos by famous faces.īarely a chapter goes by without one or other band member sitting down to chat with a stranger only to realise - blimey! - that it’s Leonard Cohen/Mama Cass/John Lennon/Janis Joplin. Utopia Avenue would be every bit as good of a book if Knock Knock were truly only a symptom of schizophrenia. It was published by Sceptre on 14 July 2020. It is his eighth published novel, and his first since Slade House (2015). Less wide-ranging and narratively adventurous than much of his work, it’s full of texture about the industry and changing attitudes towards social mobility, sex and drugs, but oddly short of a wider social or political context. Utopia Avenue is a 2020 novel by David Mitchell. He eighth novel from David Mitchell, the admired author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks, is a disappointment: a leisurely, humdrum examination of the late 60s music scene through the short career arc of an imaginary British band. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.

Emerging from London’s psychedelic scene in 1967, and fronted by folk singer Elf Holloway, blues bassist Dean Moss and guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet, Utopia Avenue embarked on a meteoric journey from the seedy clubs of Soho, a TV debut on Top of the Pops, the cusp of chart success, glory in Amsterdam, prison in Rome, and a fateful American sojourn in the Chelsea Hotel, Laurel Canyon, and San Francisco during the autumn of ’68.ĭavid Mitchell’s kaleidoscopic novel tells the unexpurgated story of Utopia Avenue’s turbulent life and times of fame’s Faustian pact and stardom’s wobbly ladder of the families we choose and the ones we don’t of voices in the head, and the truths and lies they whisper of music, madness, and idealism. Utopia Avenue is the strangest British band you’ve never heard of. The long-awaited new novel from the bestselling, prize-winning author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks.

UTOPIA AVENUE by David Mitchell - SIGNED FIRST EDITION BOOK See all titles by David Mitchell

Utopia avenue david mitchell review