David Mitchell's unusual adventure into history

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet appears to be an unexpectedly traditional book. The Reading group has been considering why

Webchat with David Mitchell: 10 things we learned

In his New Yorker review of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, James Wood wrote: "The historical novel, typically the province of genre gardeners and conservative populists, has become an unlikely laboratory for serious writers, some of them distinctly untraditional in emphasis and concern."

Robert Graves would have been spinning in his grave.

"To have the action taking place in just one place, at one moment in history a Dutch trading enclave in Japan at the end of the 18th century seemed to give the novel more gravity than Ghostwritten or Cloud Atlas."

"I didn't set out to write a historical novel just for the heck of it you'd have to be mad. Rather, only within this genre could the book be written."

"I suspect that the historical novelist's genetic code contains the geeky genes of the model maker there is pleasure to be had in the painstaking reconstruction of a lost world. A second reason is banal but overlooked: a story has to be set both somewhere and 'somewhen', and the choice is restricted to the present, the future and the past. A third motive is the challenge (and perverse pleasure) of tackling the pitfalls, foremost of which is research. Film-makers ruefully observe how every decade back in time the film is set x million dollars gets added to production costs. The same principle applies in novel-writing, but instead of dollars, read 'months'."

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