COMP CLOSED ‘Utopia Avenue’ by David Mitchell

Utopia Avenue might be the most curious British band you’ve never heard of…

Your giveaway treat this week comes from the prize-winning, bestselling, Irish-residing, twice Booker-shortlisted David Mitchell (whose seven novels include Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks). This is in fact his first novel in more than five years – the positively psychedelic Utopia Avenue – a wildly inventive novel that transports us back to the 1960s…

Emerging from London’s psychedelic scene in 1967, folksinger Elf Holloway, blues bassist Dean Moss, guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet and jazz drummer Griff Griffin together created a unique sound, with lyrics that captured their turbulent lives and times. The band produced only two albums in two years, yet their musical legacy lives on.

This is the story of the band’s brief, blazing journey from Soho clubs and draughty ballrooms to the promised land of America, just when the Summer of Love was receding into something much darker – a multi-faceted tale of dreams, drugs, love, sexuality, madness and grief; of stardom’s wobbly ladder and fame’s Faustian pact; and of the collision between youthful idealism and jaded reality as the Sixties drew to a close.

Above all, this bewitching novel celebrates the power of music to connect across divides, define an era and thrill the soul.

Sounds like a lot of fun. So, if you’d like to win yourself one of the three copies we have to give away, simply tell us what name YOU would give to a fictitious 1960s band. Our favourite three answers will WIN a copy of the book!

Entries close midday Monday 3 August 2020, Sydney/Melbourne time.

THIS COMPETITION HAS NOW CLOSED. THANKS FOR YOUR ENTRIES! WINNERS WILL BE CONTACTED BY EMAIL AND ANNOUNCED IN OUR NEWSLETTER.