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Really enjoyed this. A sharp political satire, in the form of a series of interconnected stories set in Beanstalk, a 674-story skyscraper and sovereign nation. It mostly concerns itself with matters of (visible and invisible) power, mass media and information and hype, but is both touching (the elephant Buddha story) and funny (the dog as important power broker) as well as smart.

And the Appendix is fantastic: consisting of the full length versions of some of the stories and pieces of writing that were mentioned in the plot of a number of the stories in the "main" part of the book.

Really enjoyed this - a very twisty, clever crime drama involving a vigilante serial killer, set in Chengdu. I came across is by chance in a charity shop, and as it's the first of a trilogy, I've already bought the second book (not sure the third one has been translated into English yet).

I couldn't stop reading this. A brilliant, totally captivating story set in mostly in 1940s Malaya. It's a mix of fact and fiction (even though I've been to Malaysia and the Batu Caves outside KL, I never knew about the Batu Caves Massacre, where most of the leaders of the communist Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army (MPSJA) were betrayed and killed). But more than anything, it's a story of love and a more personal kind of betrayal - the story of one man told from three very different perspectives.

This is probably one of the strangest books I've ever read, in a good way - but not for the faint-hearted.

Poetic, highly surreal, visceral, violent, explicit about everything bodily, shocking, but also very funny at the same time. I think (but could be wrong) a lot of the often gruesome violence has its origins in the Tayan (Taiwan's indigenous people) myths that pervade the storytelling.

I'm not the biggest fan of crime fiction, and picked this up in a charity shop but it's brilliant!

I don't think I've read a David Mitchell book yet that I didn't love. This is in many ways a much more straightforward book than you might be used to from him, but the combination of vivid writing, humour, an incredible amount of historical research (it's set on a Dutch trading outpost in the bay of Nagasaki in 1799) makes it if anything an ever stronger read.
How he straddles the different sensibilities of the Dutch, Japanese and English through language is amazing, but of course this wouldn't count for much if it wasn't also a very emotionally captivating novel.

This is one of these books that pulls you in and gets better and more compelling as it progresses. It deals with some very serious issues (all the protagonists are Japanese teenagers who for one reason or another do not go to school), and is part fairy tale, part YA fiction, part magic realism, part fantasy, but really quite hard to categorise.

It's very cleverly plotted, with a number of plot twists that come thick and fast towards the end, and involves a truly moving denouement.