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Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell

Cloud Atlas Cover

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Awards

Winner of The Morning News 2005 Tournament of Books
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Powells.com Staff Pick

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. Michal, Powells.com

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. Gerry, Powells.com

Review-a-Day   (What is 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:

Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, inveigles his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life. And onward, to an inglorious present-day England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history.

But the story doesn't even end there. The narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.

Review:

"Atmospheric and moving, this is an impressively assured debut." Publishers Weekly

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:

"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:

"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:

"[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.)
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What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 2 comments:
Zmrzlina, October 6, 2007 (view all comments by Zmrzlina)
Really enjoyed this book, though it is a rather convoluted read. I wasn't really sure where the story was going until I was a third of the way through, which makes it all the more enjoyable. I like a book that doesn't follow the tried and true, but isn't so weird (ie. House of Leaves) that I just can't stay with it. There are so many intricacies that I know I missed the first read, so I will go back at some point and read this again.
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cathyf, August 20, 2007 (view all comments by cathyf)
This is an amazing book. Six mini-novels, nested inside each other, each told in a different genre, a different voice, from a different time period -- the 1800's to a far future dystopia, tied together by threads of history. And each one, short as it is, is a totally absorbing tale told by fascinating and believable characters.It is a clever and wise and completely original look at the human race and the migration of souls through time.
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Product Details

ISBN:
9780340822784
Author:
Mitchell, David
Publisher:
Libri
Binding:
TRADE PAPER
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