IF I HAD ONE WISH, it’d be to wake up tomorrow really old—twenty—with all my prob-lems behind me.” But life’s just be-ginning for Jason Taylor, all of 13 in 1982—and it’s tough. Just what draws us to David Mitchell’s sad and sweet story of a stuttering teenager growing up in picturesque Black Swan Green, a small town in Worces-tershire, albeit without the swans?

For, he may have missed the Booker by a whisker in 2004 for his Calvino-inspired big book Cloud At-las, but Mitchell’s drawing all the at-tention nowthat he has been Booker longlisted for Black Swan Green. This, despite the fact, that he is up against Booker winner Peter Carey, Nadine Gordimer (Nobel and Booker win-ner), two-book old Kiran Desai and others like Sarah Waters and Andrew O’Hagan. Well, Mitchell’s fourth book just packs in a beautiful story, told simply. No, it’s nothing like his previous novels Ghostwritten or num-ber9dream, or even Cloud Atlas for that matter. This is a story about Jason—his sister simply calls him ‘Thing’—who stammers and often lapses into silence.

There is no other way, he is ashamed of it: “Makes me shrivel up like a plastic wrapper in a fire.” As it turns out, Jason is a keen observer and has also envisaged how he must be looking to people around him: “… when people stammer, they go trem-bly- red like an evenly matched arm wrestler, and their mouth gupper-gupperguppers like a fish in a net. It must be quite a funny sight.”

Soon enough, a game is born in his mind… the stammer is a mon-ster, of course. He christens him Hangman whose fingers “sink in-side my tongue and squeeze my windpipe so nothing’ll work.” If this wasn’t bad enough, Jason has to contend with bullies, a dysfunc-tional family (his parents are split-ting up), a difficult sister and his own demons.

... contd.