Black Swan Green

Selected by Time magazine as one of the ten best books of the year, The Times’s David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green traces a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the thirteen chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy. A world of Kissingeresque realpolitik enacted in boys’ games on a frozen lake; of “night creeping” through the summer backyards of strangers.