The new translation is a magnificent novel by the modern classic David Mitchell, a two-time Man Booker Prize finalist, the author of such intellectual bestsellers as Dream No. 9, Cloud Atlas (recently filmed by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski brothers), The Hungry House and other. “An acclaimed innovator who has broken new ground in literature comes with a charmingly old-fashioned novel in a classic spirit—about love and sacrifice, about the clash of civilizations, about ruthless enemies who will not rest until they have destroyed your family to the seventh generation” (Washington Post). So, the young clerk Jacob de Zoet arrives on the tiny island of Dejima near the vast feudal Japan. Among cunning merchants, cunning translators and expensive courtesans, in five years he must earn a fortune sufficient to ask for the hand of his beloved who remained in Rotterdam - however, on Dejima, his attention is captured by the young Japanese midwife Orito and the sinister abbot of the distant mountain monastery Enomoto-sensei... “Precisely for novels such as “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” wrote the Daily Telegraph, “have coined the definition of a “masterpiece.”