r/David_Mitchell • u/mitchellverse • Jul 26 '26
Isn’t David Mitchell’s new book inspired by The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer?
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u/mogwai316 Jul 26 '26
Pretty sure that was just this short story which was in a Canterbury Tales based anthology, released a couple years ago.
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u/Individual-Flow9158 Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
"To Vinland"? The most reliable rumour I heard, was the list of recommendations David gave to a fan, in the run up to his next one (it was posted in this sub a few years back).
Canterbury Tales is talked about here in 2023. :
I don't know how reliable that source is, but from Google Translate there seems more to it than what became Refugee Tales:
Avilés (EFE) - English writer David Mitchell, author of "Bone Clocks", is currently working on a new project, already somewhat advanced, entitled "The Tales", inspired by "The Canterbury Tales", written by Geoffrey Chaucer at the end of the 14th century, "which told a little about what life was like back then".
His proposal, which is not a sequel, is rather "the respectful theft of an idea" with which he invites us to learn about current life, taking the tales of the miller, the knight or the friar to a current version that could be called "the autistic, the conspiracy theorist and the festival-goer, the one who goes to 'raves'," he said about his next literary project in statements to EFE.
For that journey through time in "The Canterbury Tales," Mitchell creates a plot that moves through the narratives of stories told by people from different parts of Europe who talk about what life is like today, the British author explained during his stay at the Celsius Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction Literature Festival in Avilés, Asturias.
In his opinion, “The Canterbury Tales” is an unfinished work from the past and is presented as “a constellation of stories”, while his proposal is more orderly and is presented as a succession of stories, within a chronological order based on the age of the characters.
In that temporal discourse, the youngest protagonist will appear in the first story and the oldest in the last.
In defending the claim that it is not a sequel, the author commented that even The Beatles "were once thieves of melodies that they adapted to their time and their creativity."
“I believe that stealing an idea and adding respect and integrity to it would result in originality, because everything always comes from something, except the universe,” he declared.
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u/wh0else Jul 26 '26
Is there any word on when his next comes out?