Julian Novitz

Absolutely.

So they're always exciting novels to come back to, partly because of that mystery.

They have that wonderful noir atmosphere to them, perhaps because they're just so incomprehensible in terms of what's actually going on with the characters or the stakes.

I'm a huge David Mitchell fan, so I've read pretty much all of his other work, all of his other novels.

So this one, I think, is interesting because it's sort of a bit of a departure or a step back from some of the more fantastical or speculative fiction elements of his work.

It's a much more kind of grounded historical novel focused on the lives and the preoccupations of its more ordinary characters.

There is a kind of supernatural subplot that fans of David Mitchell will detect coming through the plot, the narrative, quite early on.

But it's much more about, I suppose, the relationships and ambitions of its kind of ordinary human characters.

So in that sense, it's in line with

One of his earlier novels, Black Swan Green, which was very much a kind of a work of straightforward literary realism and more kind of, like I'd say, a grounded exploration of the lives of its characters rather than having too many of these quite startling shifts in genre and style that are familiar from works like Cloud Atlas or his first novel, Ghost Written.

Yeah, well, what's interesting about the novel is they're kind of brought together by their manager, who's a strange example of kind of a benevolent and thoughtful manager in rock music history.

I'm not sure how many of those are around.

Devon, who hears them all performing individually in various failed acts or subpar bands.

and somehow manages to pick out that each of them is individually talented in their own right, and brings them together as a kind of a combination.

As you have Griff, who is a jazz drummer, Dean, who is very much into kind of blues, Jasper, who is just kind of presented as this kind of prodigal, incredible experimental guitarist, and then Elf Holloway, who is part of a

folk duo.

And he brings these very different sounds together and presents and kind of melds them into a band.

And I suppose the rest of the novel follows in this kind of snapshot, episodic format, various events from their lives and trajectories over, I think, about the two or three year period through which they're together.

Yeah, I mean, it has a very fast pace, as you mentioned, in the opening chapters where they're just thrown together.

And I mean, I think I enjoyed that.