The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet Reading Order

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) by David Mitchell is a historical novel set in Dejima — the artificial island in Nagasaki Harbor that was Japan's only point of contact with the outside world from 1641 to 1853 — in the years 1799 to 1817. Jacob de Zoet, a young Dutch clerk with an inconvenient conscience, arrives on Dejima to audit the books of the Dutch East India Company and falls in love with Orito Aibagawa, a Japanese midwife scarred by a burn who is one of the few women allowed near the trading post. When Orito is taken to a mountain shrine run by a corrupt monk, Jacob must decide how far outside his safe enclave he is willing to go. The novel is Mitchell's most conventionally structured — a love story and a thriller — and his most meticulously researched.