Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm. Today I'm happy to have

as my guest again, David Mitchell. He is the author of three previous novels, Ghost Written,

Number Nine Dream, and Cloud Atlas.

Now his new novel is Black Swan Green.

Well, I can begin.

Straight on.

This is a novel about the 13th year of young boy's life.

And because the first thing that I'd read from American critics is it's a sort of catcher

in the rye, and I read it, and I said, no, it's not.

And it seemed to me that one of the things that people do is to assume that all young people just turning into their teens are the same as all other young people.

Therefore, I thought I'd ask you why this particular one young person.

I wanted at last, I suppose, to write about or to write a character who has some aspects of myself.

I've always avoided this in the past, but for various reasons, perhaps becoming a father

and maybe one more segment in the curve of maturity says that where you're from, the place that you

wanted to desperately get away from when you were a kid is actually as fascinating as any other

plot of land on the globe. And perhaps it's a key plot of land on the globe

in terms of understanding yourself.

...