
It features cameos from David Bowie, Jerry Garcia, Leonard Cohen, Syd Barrett, Jackson Browne, John Lennon, Allen Ginsberg, Francis Bacon, Joni Mitchell, Steve Winwood, Keith Moon, Frank Zappa, Rick Wakeman, Cass Elliot, Sandy Denny and Marc Bolan, as well as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, Jim Morrison, and Brian Jones the latter five, coincidentally, all members of the 27 Club. Each chapter name is the title of a song and focuses on one of the members of the band. They were assembled by their Canadian manager Levon Frankland as a "psychedelic-folk-rock" supergroup. The novel follows the fictional rock band Utopia Avenue, formed in Soho, London, in 1967. The novel tells the story of the fictional 1960s British psychedelic rock band Utopia Avenue. It was published by Sceptre on 14 July 2020. It is his eighth published novel, and his first since Slade House (2015). David Mitchell’s kaleidoscopic novel tells the unexpurgated story of Utopia Avenue’s turbulent life and times of fame’s Faustian pact and stardom’s wobbly ladder of the families we choose and the ones we don’t of voices in the head, and the truths and lies they whisper of music, madness, and idealism.Utopia Avenue is a 2020 novel by David Mitchell. Emerging from London’s psychedelic scene in 1967, and fronted by folk singer Elf Holloway, blues bassist Dean Moss and guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet, Utopia Avenue embarked on a meteoric journey from the seedy clubs of Soho, a TV debut on Top of the Pops, the cusp of chart success, glory in Amsterdam, prison in Rome, and a fateful American sojourn in the Chelsea Hotel, Laurel Canyon, and San Francisco during the autumn of ’68. PopMatters Utopia Avenue is the strangest British band you’ve never heard of.Making your way through this novel feels like riding a high-end convertible down Hollywood Boulevard.”- Slate NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post


Mitchell’s prose is suppler and richer than ever.

