Poetry Month!
 
 

Special Offers see all

Enter to WIN!

Weekly drawing for $100 credit. Subscribe to our Specials newsletter for a chance to win.
Privacy Policy

More at Powell's

Recently Viewed clear list

Interviews | April 22, 2013

Jill Owens: IMG Anthony Marra: The Powells.com Interview

2 comments By Jill Owens

Anthony MarraAnthony Marra's debut novel is a marvel. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena describes, in astonishingly beautiful prose, five days in a rural... Continue »
  1. $18.20 Sale Hardcover add to wish list

    A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

    Anthony Marra 9780770436407
spacer
Ships free on qualified orders.
$7.50
List price: $15.00
Used Trade Paper
Ships in 1 to 3 days
Add to Wishlist
Qty Store Section
1 Burnside Science Fiction and Fantasy- A to Z

Cloud Atlas: A Novel

by

Cloud Atlas: A Novel Cover

 

Awards

Winner of The Morning News 2005 Tournament of Books
back to top

Staff Pick

While it was hard to narrow down my list to just five "best of" picks, I didn't have to think twice about what would be my favorite book of the year. In Cloud Atlas Mitchell again uses the format of connecting short stories with recurring motifs into a larger, almost epic narrative that spans the globe and centuries of human history. Filled with wonderful characters, effortless shifts in style, and more imagination than you can shake a stick at, Cloud Atlas will be a tough book for its author to top. Personally, I cannot wait to see him try.
Recommended by Gerry, Powells.com

For readers who enjoy good stories wrapped around an inventive structure. Each tale is obliquely connected to another moving forward through time. And each has a totally different voice and style.
Recommended by Rhonda, Powells.com

If you haven't read David Mitchell's previous novels, let Cloud Atlas be your introduction to his incredible imagination. Here six convincing and wonderfully realized worlds, filled with surprise and originality, loosely intermingle. Each story, inhabited with equally compelling characters, proves the genius of this amazingly gifted writer.
Recommended by Michal D., Powells.com

Review-A-Day

"David Mitchell is a spookily protean writer. His favored technique — he used it in his first novel, Ghostwritten — is to build a long narrative out of shorter ones, stories told in vastly different voices and styles, then cinch the whole patchwork together with some supernal device that reveals their underlying connections. In Ghostwritten, he couldn't manage to pull off that final, unifying gesture, but his third novel, Cloud Atlas, is far more convincing, a genuine and thoroughly entertaining literary puzzle." Laura Miller, Salon.com (read the entire Salon.com review)

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

From David Mitchell, the Booker Prize nominee, award-winning writer and one of the featured authors in Granta's "Best of Young British Novelists 2003" issue, comes his highly anticipated third novel, a work of mind-bending imagination and scope.

A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan's California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified "dinery server" on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilization — the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other's echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small.

In his captivating third novel, David Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation on humanity's dangerous will to power, and where it may lead us.

Review:

"At once audacious, dazzling, pretentious and infuriating, Mitchell's third novel weaves history, science, suspense, humor and pathos through six separate but loosely related narratives. Like Mitchell's previous works, Ghostwritten and number9dream (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize), this latest foray relies on a kaleidoscopic plot structure that showcases the author's stylistic virtuosity. Each of the narratives is set in a different time and place, each is written in a different prose style, each is broken off mid-action and brought to conclusion in the second half of the book. Among the volume's most engaging story lines is a witty 1930s-era chronicle, via letters, of a young musician's effort to become an amanuensis for a renowned, blind composer and a hilarious account of a modern-day vanity publisher who is institutionalized by a stroke and plans a madcap escape in order to return to his literary empire (such as it is). Mitchell's ability to throw his voice may remind some readers of David Foster Wallace, though the intermittent hollowness of his ventriloquism frustrates. Still, readers who enjoy the 'novel as puzzle' will find much to savor in this original and occasionally very entertaining work. Agent, Douglas Stewart. (Aug. 24) Forecast: Lots of buzz and a friendly paperback price will ensure strong sales, but like other fashionable tomes (think Pynchon's Mason & Dixon) Mitchell's novel may be more admired than read." Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Review:

"[A] remarkable achievement, a frightening, beautiful, funny, wildly inventive, elaborately conceived tour de force....Each of these tales more than earns its keep. Collectively, they constitute a work of art." San Francisco Chronicle

Review:

"Great Britain's answer to Thomas Pynchon outdoes himself...maddeningly intricate, improbably entertaining....[O]ne of the most imaginative and rewarding novels in recent memory....Sheer storytelling brilliance." Kirkus Reviews

Review:

"Mitchell has a gift for creating fully realized worlds with a varied cast of characters. However...while the clever construction serves to highlight the novel's big ideas, the continual interruptions may distance the average reader." Library Journal

Review:

"The novel as series of nested dolls or Chinese boxes, a puzzle-book, and yet — not just dazzling, amusing or clever but heartbreaking and passionate, too. I've never read anything quite like it, and I'm grateful to have lived, for a while, in all its many worlds, which are all one world, which is, in turn, enchanted by Mitchell's spell-caster prose, our own." Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Review:

"This rich, imaginative novel parcels out its surprises with impeccable timing, and the less you know in advance, the more pleasure it gives....Exhilarating, challenging, full of invention, this book may show where the future of the novel — and of humanity — is headed." Orlando Sentinel

Review:

"Cloud Atlas is no novel for the casual reader in search of easy entertainment, though much of it reads with the ease of a commercial page-turner. It is a finely wrought text, examining both past and future, for our time." Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Review:

"Mitchell's talents for riotous incident and energetic prose keep the pages turning, but Atlas' disparate strands are linked only by the flimsiest of pretenses....The six cylinders never function as one engine. (Grade: B)" Entertainment Weekly

Review:

"Mitchell's exploration of power and greed is riveting, and the way the stories come together, through time and cultures, is astonishing. Cloud Atlas is a novel not to be missed." Rocky Mountain News

Review:

"Mitchell possesses an amazingly copious and eclectic imagination." William Boyd

Review:

"Mitchell is, clearly, a genius. He...can evidently do anything, and his ambition is written in magma across this novel's every page. But Cloud Atlas is the sort of book that makes ambition seem slightly suspect..." Tom Bissell, The New York Times Book Review

Review:

"A boomeranging historical novel moving from the Age of Discover to post-apocalyptic Hawaii with stops on the way in China Syndrome-era California and dystopian capitalist Korea. An amazing performance of ventriloquism and brains." Tin House magazine

Review:

"Watch out for Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, a work of free-wheeling fantasy by a cutting-edge writer." David Robson, Sunday Telegraph (U.K.)

Review:

"Mr. Mitchell is on record that his goal was a reading experience akin to taking apart a Russian doll, then putting it back together. To this extent, he has certainly succeeded....For all its dazzle, though, Cloud Atlas is substance still searching for style." Dallas Morning News

Review:

"[Mitchell's] previous novels, Ghostwritten and Number9Dream, also feature stories that are interconnected, but tenuously. His handling of the technique in Cloud Atlas is more dexterous." The Oregonian (Portland, OR)

Review:

"Some of Mitchell's sections are quite brilliant and moving, while a couple devolve to the pedestrian, marring the overall effect of the novel." Chicago Tribune

Review:

"[A] remarkable book....It knits together science fiction, political thriller and historical pastiche with musical virtuosity and linguistic exuberance: there won't be a bigger, bolder novel next year." Justine Jordan, The Guardian (U.K.)

Review:

"David Mitchell is by no means a complete unknown, but I shall be very surprised if...Cloud Atlas doesn't propel him into the front rank of novelists." D J Taylor, The Independent (U.K.)

Review:

"One of the biggest joys of Cloud Atlas is to watch Mitchell sashay from genre to genre without a hitch in his dance step. Whether you are a fantasy-book reader or a thriller reader...you will find Cloud Atlas maintains a startling level of authenticity throughout." Hartford Courant

Review:

"A daunting talent, adept with the global canvas, and able to move from the technological to the spiritual with supernatural ease." Suzi Feay, Independent on Sunday (U.K.)

Synopsis:

In his captivating third novel, Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre, and time to offer a meditation on humanity's dangerous will to power, and where it may lead.

Synopsis:

Now a major motion picture starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon, and Hugh Grant, and directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer

A postmodern visionary who is also a master of styles of genres, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian lore of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco and Philip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction that reveals how disparate people connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.

back to top

About the Author

David Mitchell is one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2003. His first novel, Ghostwritten, won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and his second, number9dream, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lives in Herefordshire, England.
back to top

What Our Readers Are Saying

Add a comment for a chance to win!
Average customer rating based on 50 comments:
Lee Turnbull, January 31, 2013 (view all comments by Lee Turnbull)
A beautifully rendered novel comprised of six nesting stories. David Mitchell's tour-de-force is both profound and a delight to read.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No
(2 of 4 readers found this comment helpful)
report this comment
lukas, January 30, 2013 (view all comments by lukas)
Wow, people really like this book. I'll admit I didn't read it until after the movie came out, a movie I had no interest in (although who doesn't look non-Asian actors playing Asians?). Plenty of smarter folks than I am think this book is some kind of masterpiece. And it is virtuosic to be sure, with it's dazzling blend of styles and possibly interconnected plot lines, but is sure isn't much fun to read. I dare anybody to read the "Sloosha's Crossin' An' Ev'rythin' After" section out loud without snickering. Heck, just read that title. I don't get the fuss, but this is certainly hermetic post-modern wankery on the vastest, most self-indulgent scale.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No
(2 of 4 readers found this comment helpful)
report this comment
joannebeth14, January 30, 2013 (view all comments by joannebeth14)
It's a unique experience. Don't go see the movie, read the book.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No
(1 of 2 readers found this comment helpful)
report this comment
View all 50 comments
back to top

Product Details

ISBN:
9780375507250
Subtitle:
A Novel
Author:
Mitchell, David
Publisher:
Random House Trade
Location:
New York
Subject:
General
Subject:
Literary
Subject:
Reincarnation
Subject:
Fantasy fiction
Subject:
Fate and fatalism
Subject:
Fantasy - General
Subject:
General Fiction
Subject:
Literature-A to Z
Copyright:
2004
Edition Number:
1st U.S. ed.
Edition Description:
Trade paper
Publication Date:
August 2004
Binding:
TRADE PAPER
Grade Level:
General/trade
Language:
English
Pages:
528
Dimensions:
8 x 5.31 in 1 lb
back to top

Other books you might like

  1. The Kite Runner
    Used Trade Paper $1.95
  2. The Known World
    Used Trade Paper $2.95
  3. The Curious Incident of the Dog in...
    Used Trade Paper $3.95
  4. The Shadow of the Wind
    Used Trade Paper $5.95
  5. The Time Traveler's Wife
    Used Trade Paper $2.95
  6. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
    Used Trade Paper $8.50
back to top

Related Subjects


Featured Titles » Bestsellers
Featured Titles » General
Featured Titles » Genre
Featured Titles » Literature
Fiction and Poetry » Literature » A to Z
Fiction and Poetry » Science Fiction and Fantasy » A to Z
Fiction and Poetry » Science Fiction and Fantasy » Fantasy » General

Cloud Atlas: A Novel Used Trade Paper
0 stars - 0 reviews
$7.50 In Stock
Product details 528 pages Random House Trade - English 9780375507250 Reviews:
"Staff Pick" by ,

While it was hard to narrow down my list to just five "best of" picks, I didn't have to think twice about what would be my favorite book of the year. In Cloud Atlas Mitchell again uses the format of connecting short stories with recurring motifs into a larger, almost epic narrative that spans the globe and centuries of human history. Filled with wonderful characters, effortless shifts in style, and more imagination than you can shake a stick at, Cloud Atlas will be a tough book for its author to top. Personally, I cannot wait to see him try.

by Gerry
"Staff Pick" by ,

For readers who enjoy good stories wrapped around an inventive structure. Each tale is obliquely connected to another moving forward through time. And each has a totally different voice and style.

by Rhonda
"Staff Pick" by ,

If you haven't read David Mitchell's previous novels, let Cloud Atlas be your introduction to his incredible imagination. Here six convincing and wonderfully realized worlds, filled with surprise and originality, loosely intermingle. Each story, inhabited with equally compelling characters, proves the genius of this amazingly gifted writer.

by Michal D.
"Publishers Weekly Review" by , "At once audacious, dazzling, pretentious and infuriating, Mitchell's third novel weaves history, science, suspense, humor and pathos through six separate but loosely related narratives. Like Mitchell's previous works, Ghostwritten and number9dream (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize), this latest foray relies on a kaleidoscopic plot structure that showcases the author's stylistic virtuosity. Each of the narratives is set in a different time and place, each is written in a different prose style, each is broken off mid-action and brought to conclusion in the second half of the book. Among the volume's most engaging story lines is a witty 1930s-era chronicle, via letters, of a young musician's effort to become an amanuensis for a renowned, blind composer and a hilarious account of a modern-day vanity publisher who is institutionalized by a stroke and plans a madcap escape in order to return to his literary empire (such as it is). Mitchell's ability to throw his voice may remind some readers of David Foster Wallace, though the intermittent hollowness of his ventriloquism frustrates. Still, readers who enjoy the 'novel as puzzle' will find much to savor in this original and occasionally very entertaining work. Agent, Douglas Stewart. (Aug. 24) Forecast: Lots of buzz and a friendly paperback price will ensure strong sales, but like other fashionable tomes (think Pynchon's Mason & Dixon) Mitchell's novel may be more admired than read." Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"Review A Day" by , "David Mitchell is a spookily protean writer. His favored technique — he used it in his first novel, Ghostwritten — is to build a long narrative out of shorter ones, stories told in vastly different voices and styles, then cinch the whole patchwork together with some supernal device that reveals their underlying connections. In Ghostwritten, he couldn't manage to pull off that final, unifying gesture, but his third novel, Cloud Atlas, is far more convincing, a genuine and thoroughly entertaining literary puzzle." (read the entire Salon.com review)
"Review" by , "[A] remarkable achievement, a frightening, beautiful, funny, wildly inventive, elaborately conceived tour de force....Each of these tales more than earns its keep. Collectively, they constitute a work of art."
"Review" by , "Great Britain's answer to Thomas Pynchon outdoes himself...maddeningly intricate, improbably entertaining....[O]ne of the most imaginative and rewarding novels in recent memory....Sheer storytelling brilliance."
"Review" by , "Mitchell has a gift for creating fully realized worlds with a varied cast of characters. However...while the clever construction serves to highlight the novel's big ideas, the continual interruptions may distance the average reader."
"Review" by , "The novel as series of nested dolls or Chinese boxes, a puzzle-book, and yet — not just dazzling, amusing or clever but heartbreaking and passionate, too. I've never read anything quite like it, and I'm grateful to have lived, for a while, in all its many worlds, which are all one world, which is, in turn, enchanted by Mitchell's spell-caster prose, our own."
"Review" by , "This rich, imaginative novel parcels out its surprises with impeccable timing, and the less you know in advance, the more pleasure it gives....Exhilarating, challenging, full of invention, this book may show where the future of the novel — and of humanity — is headed."
"Review" by , "Cloud Atlas is no novel for the casual reader in search of easy entertainment, though much of it reads with the ease of a commercial page-turner. It is a finely wrought text, examining both past and future, for our time."
"Review" by , "Mitchell's talents for riotous incident and energetic prose keep the pages turning, but Atlas' disparate strands are linked only by the flimsiest of pretenses....The six cylinders never function as one engine. (Grade: B)"
"Review" by , "Mitchell's exploration of power and greed is riveting, and the way the stories come together, through time and cultures, is astonishing. Cloud Atlas is a novel not to be missed."
"Review" by , "Mitchell possesses an amazingly copious and eclectic imagination."
"Review" by , "Mitchell is, clearly, a genius. He...can evidently do anything, and his ambition is written in magma across this novel's every page. But Cloud Atlas is the sort of book that makes ambition seem slightly suspect..."
"Review" by , "A boomeranging historical novel moving from the Age of Discover to post-apocalyptic Hawaii with stops on the way in China Syndrome-era California and dystopian capitalist Korea. An amazing performance of ventriloquism and brains."
"Review" by , "Watch out for Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, a work of free-wheeling fantasy by a cutting-edge writer."
"Review" by , "Mr. Mitchell is on record that his goal was a reading experience akin to taking apart a Russian doll, then putting it back together. To this extent, he has certainly succeeded....For all its dazzle, though, Cloud Atlas is substance still searching for style."
"Review" by , "[Mitchell's] previous novels, Ghostwritten and Number9Dream, also feature stories that are interconnected, but tenuously. His handling of the technique in Cloud Atlas is more dexterous."
"Review" by , "Some of Mitchell's sections are quite brilliant and moving, while a couple devolve to the pedestrian, marring the overall effect of the novel."
"Review" by , "[A] remarkable book....It knits together science fiction, political thriller and historical pastiche with musical virtuosity and linguistic exuberance: there won't be a bigger, bolder novel next year."
"Review" by , "David Mitchell is by no means a complete unknown, but I shall be very surprised if...Cloud Atlas doesn't propel him into the front rank of novelists."
"Review" by , "One of the biggest joys of Cloud Atlas is to watch Mitchell sashay from genre to genre without a hitch in his dance step. Whether you are a fantasy-book reader or a thriller reader...you will find Cloud Atlas maintains a startling level of authenticity throughout."
"Review" by , "A daunting talent, adept with the global canvas, and able to move from the technological to the spiritual with supernatural ease."
"Synopsis" by , In his captivating third novel, Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre, and time to offer a meditation on humanity's dangerous will to power, and where it may lead.
"Synopsis" by , Now a major motion picture starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon, and Hugh Grant, and directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer

A postmodern visionary who is also a master of styles of genres, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian lore of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco and Philip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction that reveals how disparate people connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.
spacer
spacer
  • back to top
Follow us on...




Powell's City of Books is an independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon, that fills a whole city block with more than a million new, used, and out of print books. Shop those shelves — plus literally millions more books, DVDs, and eBooks — here at Powells.com.