Utopia Avenue
- Author: Mitchell, David
With his huge electric brain, Mitchell has written his own solo scenius, one that draws connections between Edo-era Japan and a distant, post-human-collapse future. It's a grand project, brilliantly...
Utopia Avenue
- Author: Mitchell, David
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With his huge electric brain, Mitchell has written his own solo scenius, one that draws connections between Edo-era Japan and a distant, post-human-collapse future. It's a grand project, brilliantly...
About
The year is 1967 and word is spreading about a new band on London's psychedelic scene - an unlikely combination of a female folksinger, a blues bassist, a jazz drummer and an electric guitarist. Strangers to each other and from widely different backgrounds, together they create magic. Meet Utopia Avenue.
This is the story of a unique band's brief, blazing journey from Soho dives to chart success and on to the promised land of America, just when the Summer of Love was giving way to something much darker - a tale of dreams, drugs, sexuality, madness and grief, and of fame's pitfalls. Capturing a time when youthful idealism collided with jaded reality, this bewitching novel celebrates the power of music to connect across divides, define an era and thrill the soul.
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- Utopia Avenue
Awards and reviews
With his huge electric brain, Mitchell has written his own solo scenius, one that draws connections between Edo-era Japan and a distant, post-human-collapse future. It's a grand project, brilliantly executed and deeply humanist. Utopia Avenue is the most fun stop along the way and aptly named
What makes it a stand-out triumph is the vibrant flair with which it recreates an era, the acuteness with which it explores composition and performance, and its often witty verbal finesse. -- Peter Kemp
[A] 1960s music epic
Mitchell is expert at excavating the seams of loss, ambition and mere chance that lie under the edifice of fame . . . The reader is impelled from the first by a kind of rushing, gleeful energy . . . a supremely readable novel, if the quality of readability is taken to be one which is difficult to achieve and a relief to encounter. -- Sarah Perry
An ambitious, rambunctious, hugely enjoyable tale . . . [it] is filled with sparkling dialogue and has stimulating things to say about creativity, mental health, the effects of domestic violence, the Vietnam War, grief, parental responsibility and what it was perhaps like to be an independent-minded female musician back in the day. Above all, Mitchell pulls off this bold attempt at a novel exploring the undefinable mysteries of music and why music has such an impact on people. -- Martin Chilton
[Mitchell] tells a linear tale and eschews literary pirouetting to create a set of characters and recreate a period with . . . [such] superb believability . . . Gig upon gig conjures that danger and euphoria of the live experience of amplified sound . . . Mitchell rescues this brief slice of the past, made so poignant because its brilliance was so ephemeral, and brings it into the shimmering present. The result is that Utopia Avenue does what music does: it joins up time. -- Serena Davies
Charting the rise to stardom of a "psychedelic-folk-rock band" in the late 1960s, this gaudy, swirling concept album of a novel resurrects a flamboyant era with vibrant flair and high-fidelity detail. Amid a whirligig of funny, elating and affecting scenes, the origins, challenges and rewards of creativity are keenly surveyed. David Mitchell's stylish prose makes every page gleam
