I kept picking up David Mitchell’s previous book (Cloud Atlas) in bookshops and then putting it down as I wasn’t sure about it. So when I read reports of this book, generally saying something along the lines of “Yes, Cloud Atlas was good, but this is better.” I decided I’d try this one first.

The story is a year in the life of 13 year old Jason Taylor; the year is 1982, the place is a village in Worcestershire. In the beginning I wasn’t at all convinced. It seemed to be “fiction by brand name”: give everything from 1982 its proper name and pretend you’re evoking the time and place. I don’t need to be told what an eighties comprehensive in middle England was like - been there, done that! However I enjoyed the book a lot more as it went on and the story unfolded. The first person narration works because the reader can see what is happening when the narrator himself can’t read the signs. Being 1982 we go through the Falklands War and I wonder whether deliberately Mitchell meant to parallel The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole (another 13 year old in 1982).

In the end I really liked the storytelling and the characters, and I will probably go back and read David Mitchell again, and I certainly think I’ll read whatever he writes next.