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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Tender.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm, and today I have the entire pleasure and thrill to be talking to David Mitchell, the author most recently of the Bonecocks, very well known to

bookworm listeners, but why should I be vain, known to the world of readers for Cloud Atlas

and Black Swan Green and the Thousand Autumn of Jacob DeSault, a wonderful writer who's taken us on a magnificent adventure.

Now, David, when people ask you what this one is about, what do you say?

How do you tell them?

It's tough.

I've evolved an elevator pitch that I can lay before you if you wish for it.

Let's experiment. Go ahead.

Okay.

It's about the life of its protagonist who is called Holly Sykes.

We meet her at six different stages of her life.

Firstly, 1984 when she's a runaway teenage punkette.

Secondly, when she's the narrator's brief lover in Switzerland in the early 90s.

Thirdly, we meet her when she's a mother of a six-year-old in Brighton in 2004,

experience there through the narrator who is the father of her child,

...