Black Swan Green : A Novel

After three books with notably elaborate narrative structures, Mitchell has chosen one narrator, thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, to tell the story of one year (1982) in a sleepy English town, Worcestershire's Black Swan Green. But the thirteen chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy.

In that one calamitous year, Jason battles his stammer, experiences the cruelty that adolescent boys can inflict on one another, watches the slow disintegration of his parents' marriage and follows the tabloid-fueled thrills of the Falklands War and its human toll. This semi-autobiographical tale tells the volatile nature of life with sadness and plenty of humour.