Compared with almost everything being written now, it is vertiginously ambitious - and brilliant - The TimesUnquestionably a marvel - entirely original among contemporary British novels, revealing its author as, surely, the most impressive fictional mind of his generation - ObserverArguably his finest . . . It will doubtless earn Mitchell his fourth Man Booker nomination and, if there's any justice, his first win. - Sunday TelegraphHowever densely charted and richly sketched, this sumptuous imbroglio never drags . . . Mitchell flexes his prose virtuosity. More than before, those muscles do the heart's work. - IndependentSpectacularly accomplished and thrillingly suspenseful . . . a narrative of panoramic span. Mitchell fills his pages with a medley of accents, idioms and speech habits. Prodigiously researched, his book resurrects a place and period with riveting immediacy . . . it brims with rich, involving and affecting humanity - Sunday TimesThat rare thing - a novel which actually deserves the accolade "tour de force" - Daily Telegraph Books of the YearMoving, thoughtful and unexpectedly funny - Observer Books of the YearHugely enjoyable . . . the descriptions of Dejima and what life there must have been like are extraordinarily accurate - Literary Review