Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers

I finished the new Dave Eggers book Zeitoun yesterday morning.

Although nowadays my definition of what constitutes "good literature" is to some  extent dependent on whether on not a piece of work can actually keep me awake, I really enjoyed the book.

David Mitchell and Tom Holland

I’m reading two books at the moment. The work of fiction is David Mitchell’s The One Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. The non-fiction work is Tom Holland's Rubicon.

David Mitchell's novel is set on the Japanese coast at the end of the 18th century. I'm not yet clear why the author uses characters mainly from the Netherlands and Japan, and set it in that particular period? After all, it has relatively little historical resonance for a British reader.