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Powell's Staff: 20% Donation on 20 Books: Buy Banned Books and Support American Booksellers for Free Expression (2 comments)
Banned Books Week (in 2023, the week spans from October 1–7) is an important time here at Powell’s. We believe in everyone’s freedom to read and to seek out and express ideas. When a book is threatened, our community is threatened. This year, we are donating 20% of the sales on Powells.com of the 20 titles listed below, all of which....
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  • Eliza Clark: Powell’s Q&A: Eliza Clark, author of ‘Penance’ (0 comment)

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Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell
Cloud Atlas

  • Comment on this title
  • Synopses & Reviews
  • Award Excerpt

ISBN13: 9780375507250
ISBN10: 0375507256



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Awards

Winner of The Morning News 2005 Tournament of Books

From Powells.com

25 Books to Read Before You Die: 21st Century

These books create a stunning portrait of contemporary American life.


Staff Pick

A Russian nesting doll of a novel, each of the six interlocking stories in Cloud Atlas contains oblique references to the ones that directly precede and follow it. Add to that a unique chronological structure that moves forward and then backward in time and Mitchell’s virtuosic handling of an array of narrative styles — including historical fiction, thriller, comedy, and sci-fi — and you have a novel that not only reads brilliantly, but is complex, wild, and wondrous. I’ve read and loved most of Mitchell’s work, but Cloud Atlas is one of those magical books that shimmers in your mind long after reading it; so few books come close to the excitement, mystery, and challenge it offers. Recommended By Rhianna W., Powells.com

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

"[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.)

Review

"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)

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.


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.

4.9 48

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating 4.9 (48 comments)

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Lee Turnbull , January 31, 2013
A beautifully rendered novel comprised of six nesting stories. David Mitchell's tour-de-force is both profound and a delight to read.

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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.

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joannebeth14 , January 30, 2013
It's a unique experience. Don't go see the movie, read the book.

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Shannon Hunt , January 30, 2013
Not just my favorite book of 2012, but an all-time favorite, Cloud Atlas is a wonderful read. David Mitchell gives us a little bit of everything - sci-fi, mystery, adventure, betrayal, humor - and writes in such a way that keeps the reader absolutely gripped. The narrative takes you on a grand adventure that you won't want to end. Set in six different settings and time periods, the stories could stand on their own; but Mitchell weaves them together beautifully as the book progresses. This is a book I look forward to enjoying again and again, each time discovering new details I didn't catch the first time through.

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FatKitty313 , January 30, 2013
Reason for comment: I needed to write something...and wanted to nominate for best book of 2012. My reading was a re-read of "Cloud Atlas" and it was even better the 2nd time around (like Vonnegut always said - books are complicated things and there is only so many things we can get with one read). I will admit, I initially picked up the books years ago in a Borders because of the cover. I made the purchase because of the sci-fi elements and the setting of Hawaii for one of the six stories. However, "Cloud Atlas" has to be in my top ten all-time books due to it's structure, prose, and the ability of the author to weave this disparate characters and stories together to make me give a damn and try and find the connections in my stories with those around me. Top notch!

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Elizabeth Finley , January 30, 2013 (view all comments by Elizabeth Finley)
I read this book on the recommendation of my daughter who had just finished her English Literature degree at the University of Wales Newport, she claimed that it was the best book she had read. With the movie right around the corner I decided that I had better see what she was talking about. I found David Mitchel's writing exquisite and enthralling, I could not put the book down. I was completely drawn into the story line and the characters. The book also made me think about our actions and ramifications there of in our future generations. I think that I have to agree with my daughter, simple the best book I have read.

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Joni Pony , January 24, 2013
Ten minutes after finishing this book I found myself lonely for it, desperate to wear in the binding from chapter one and begin anew. If it were possible to un-know the contents of “Cloud Atlas” and discover them again, I would embark on this journey every year for the rest of my life...the powerful images still flit through my daydreams and nightdreams...an aged composer...a stopover in the Chatham Islands...a dystopic ultramodern Korea...a publisher, locked away... This book will enchant the deepest parts of your curious, questioning mind, and if you haven’t got one of those, this book will give it to you. I am not the most well-read bon. lass ‘mongst the bookish Warrior Womyn class of the Pacific Northwest, but I punch in more than a few nights a week at our City of Books and somehow always make time to hole up and retreat to my page worlds. Thus with this trifling credibility I entreat you to read this book; it is probably the greatest work of our century. “Cloud Atlas” is a genre-bending voyage through times, spaces, cultures, races, political systems, social orders, religious assumptions, genders, and so, so many more of the hinges that humanize us. The author has described his championing work as a "sextet for overlapping soloists", in which each solo is interrupted by its successor and in the second, each interruption is continued in order. The byzantine structure of the book is woven by six overlapping stories, each revealed by not only different characters but also vastly dissimilar flairs of script. The author graces us with stylistic fluctuations of historical, science, noir, farce, and comic fiction, and each takes their shape via diaries, letters, mysteries, interviews, and a tale told around a fire. The dense book is daunting at first, but when you consider that it covers kindness, cruelty, civilization, greed, vengeance, art, history, faith, tradition, love, family, religion, barbarism, enslavement, release, the corrupting and dehumanizing nature of power, the universal cultural story of societies rising, falling, and building again, all told with a stimulating and challenging narrative, it is amazing that David Mitchell could manage to fit a lifetime’s (or two or ten’s) worth of philosophizing into a mere five hundred pages. Somehow, without my noticing, the book managed to fit ALL of this discourse into an entertaining read that detonated my cognizance towards the minutest of intricacies, but closed on a simple, beautiful theme. The last lines will leave you sated and bursting with a love of man. Surprisingly, the book elicited within me deep stirrings on God and What Is Godly. The multiple religious constructs presented in the book had me questioning my own lack of questioning in hateful ways, only to feel, at the next chapter, a deep yearning for the conviction expressed by the characters therein and a jealousy of their certainty--which I found amusing given that my region has the lowest rate of church attendance in the United States and consistently reports the highest percentage of atheism. Throughout the book you may notice a handful of blatant references to other films, books, stories, fables, musical passages. Why would the author appropriate, plainly and in even the least-cultured reader’s sight, the characters, story arches, and concepts of 1984, Blade Runner, Nurse Ratched, Soylent Green and other classics? These references are rife with meaning and are not to be casually overlooked. In addition to confronting tough and unfamiliar language, I had to concentrate very hard just to glean every bit of meaning from the lush passages. Many key thematic tirades were loaded with double and even triple meanings, and I found myself pawing back and back again just to be sure I had them all. I agree with other reviewers that it was hard to get into Chapter One at first, in fact, all of the chapters were a little bit hard to “settle into”, and they took quite a bit of “legwork” and guessing from the reader in terms of determining time, place, new characters, etc. I didn’t care for the middle story (the central anchor) much…call me lazy but I don’t like invented slang that takes hours to dissect; it feels gimmicky, and his payoff wasn’t worth the reward to me as a reader. Most of the work WAS well worth it though, and by the time I was 25% through the book I knew I wouldn’t be able to eat, sleep, or do ANYTHING until I had finished the entire thing. Work through the research and enjoy this part of the process...your patience will be greatly rewarded. I predict “Cloud Atlas” will go down in publishing history as the rumbling cult favorite that spawned the visionary artists, thinkers, and designers of the future. This book is required reading for anyone who aspires to pass through the ignorance/innocence of childhood and into the realm of adulthood. Take the time to dissect this beautiful gift of a novel and be forever enlightened as to man’s capacity for love, hate, good, evil, and maybe, just maybe, deliverance.

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abigailrosepdx , January 21, 2013 (view all comments by abigailrosepdx)
Cloud Atlas completely blew me away. I consumed this book in two days, unable to put it down. Everything about it was vivid and rich. The characters popped off of the page, and the story wrapped itself around me as I read, gripping me tightly. I loved the formatting of this book, and the way David paced the chapters. Each story flowed into the next with an intriguing rhythm. One moment I felt enchanted and romantic, the next horrified and disgusted, and then suddenly I would find myself laughing at one of Cavendish's hilarious comments. I can say without hesitation that this was the best book I read in 2012.

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Rodney Wilder , January 12, 2013 (view all comments by Rodney Wilder)
An absolutely amazing mosaic of interweaving narratives and cosmic commonality. Its message is deeply moving and emotionally rewarding to the reader.

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Rodney Wilder , October 13, 2012 (view all comments by Rodney Wilder)
Once in a blue moon will the voracity-tongued reader encounter an author with David Mitchell's combination of fearlessness and skill. "Cloud Atlas", his third novel in a steadily increasing catalogue, is an exemplary work attesting to just how brilliantly those traits commingle in the author's craft. Simply put, "Cloud Atlas" is phenomenal. To be more precise, "Cloud Atlas" is an unprecedented and inimitable work of art, a masterpiece the world of contemporary literature should be proud to see issue from its inveterate loins. If this praise seems too high to be truly warranted, a week-long sojourn in the book will confirm what I theorize: "Cloud Atlas" is unlike anything you likely have ever read, or will ever read again. The glory of Mitchell's creation is in its transcendent nature. "Cloud Atlas" tells a story, of course, and an engaging one at that, but it is so much more than the events of its ongoing narrative. There is an attention to detail the likes of which literature had theretofore (2004, the book's release) never known, not just in its literal composition, but in the very arrangement of its contents. The order in which Mitchell chose to unfold his expository sextet is so profound and brilliant I, in all my obvious verbosity, am left grasping for the appropriate descriptors. I hesitate to go further into detail for fear of shattering prematurely what is a truly mind-blowing and rewarding mosaic. I can only report that it is an incredible, unfathomably connected set of stories, and hope that you take me up on my promises. There is heart to "Cloud Atlas." In its entirety, there is a revelry in the spectrum of human existence; sadness and joy, life and death, love and hate. "Cloud Atlas" is a celebration of all it is to be both human and spirit, a rapturously written map of the latter's effect within and around the former. It challenges the reader to rethink human purpose, the function of life and relationships, and most of all the infinite nature of our actions and choices. It challenges, but the payoff is, for all my wordy attempts, wholly indescribable. You will not regret a single moment spent drifting through this atlas of clouds. You have my word.

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h , August 18, 2012 (view all comments by h)
Before the movie hits the screens, read Mitchell's captivating novel that travels across time, across genres. Reviewers call it "virtuosic" and that's an apt description. The novel chronicles a 19th explorer and a cloned human, a journalist, a composer, and a publisher all against the backdrop of a post-apocalyptic world.

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EKFD , August 15, 2012
This book is a sometimes exhausting roller coaster for the reader, who must adjust to new stories and styles, or pick up the thread of a story left behind several hundred pages back. But that is what makes it so creative and interesting. Mitchell's mastery of language and social commentary will leave you spinning, deep in thought, and ultimately satisfied with a very good read.

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Katherine Stevens , January 05, 2012 (view all comments by Katherine Stevens)
This was both the most challenging and rewarding book I read in 2012, a Jacob's ladder of stories in masterfully different styles and time periods that colorfully clicked together to create one breathtakingly unbreakable chain.

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Josh Sadow-Hasenbert , January 03, 2012
This is everything I could want in a book.

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Sarah23 , January 02, 2012
This is a beautiful, thought-provoking book. I loved the different parts of it, and I wanted each to continue. Months after finishing it, I find that I am still haunted by certain scenes, ideas or implications of it.

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Scott Meyer , January 02, 2012
Through seven layers of stories, you drift through the past and the future, while always in sight of the present's tension between driving self-absorption and profound generosity. The book's unique structure is not a clever trick for the author to show off - it pulls you into the narrative and unfurls its meaning.

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JLauderbaugh , January 01, 2012
This book is, in every sense of the word, brilliant!

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Clover88 , October 12, 2011 (view all comments by Clover88)
This was the most exciting, thought-provoking, challenging and beautifully written book I have read in a long time, maybe ever. You can read it as a collection of shorter pieces that eventually are pulled together. But you can also read it as a new type of story, one where the original format of the book is equally interesting and thought-provoking, making you consider "What is a novel?" Read this book!

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Evan Gottlieb , September 20, 2011
If you want to see what contemporary fiction can do, this book is for you! If you want to to be entertained and provoked to think at the same time, this book is also for you! It's not perfect, and every section might not be equally to your taste -- but it's a virtuosic achievement.

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simmonsr , January 29, 2011 (view all comments by simmonsr)
This is the best book I have read in a long, long while. Amazing writerly craft is on full display in this jigsaw puzzle of a book. Highly clever, multi voiced and absolutely fascinating. The premise: several stories with only the most tenuous of connective threads are presented to the reader and all end on cliff hangers. At the middle of the book each story is brought back and "finished". I was captivated, and truly saddened to have each story end. Brilliant!

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Virginia Husting , January 27, 2011
Cloud Atlas wove me into a fabric of stories, implications, people, and problems that made me feel less alone in the world and less crazy for thinking about it as I do. I highly recommend it: make sure to push *past* the first story, since the book is not at all what it seems at the start.

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Ayala , January 07, 2011
This book was a fascinating mix of genres and time periods. It started off slowly but built to a disturbing dystopian crescendo. I particularly enjoyed trying to make sense of the relationships between the characters of each time period.

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jacob sexton , January 01, 2011
complicated, genre-bending, and technically brilliant.

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Jaida , January 01, 2011 (view all comments by Jaida)
I'd been reading reviews about David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob Zoet. I couldn't find any of his books in my local bookstore except Black Swan Green, which I bought (used) and read with increasing joy. At last, I've found a new real writer, someone who loves language but doesn't overdo it with false flourishes; who loves people and creates characters I want to know; who is deeply imaginative but creates worlds that feel familiar. Then I purchased The Thousand Autumns of Jacob Zoet, a slower and subtler novel, but rich with details that felt true to me (having lived in Japan for several years). Again, I was completely drawn in to the world he created, cared about the people he'd created, but was also delighted by his language, the sentences themselves. Finally, I read Cloud Atlas - and here were 6 worlds to inhabit, entirely different characters, changes of voice, visions of futures....I jumped back and forth, rereading passages, savoring sentences, then scurrying forward to follow the different plots. His pacing, his words....the brilliance of the whole...What can I say? It's hard to choose any best loved book for 2010, but the three of these would have to be the top three, and Cloud Atlas finally the very greatest.

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squoo , January 01, 2011 (view all comments by squoo)
This is an amazing book in which David Mitchell manages to beautifully intertwine six stories with six different voices. Highly recommended.

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10ekb , January 01, 2011
Best book I read this year!

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Denizen , January 01, 2011
At first glance this book has six disparate stories. But, as in a tapestry, there are threads that bind them together with colors that re-emerge, disappear, or flash brilliantly to highlight the extreme humanity that is the heart of its theme. An excellent book club book to share.

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EastcoastLady , January 01, 2011
I loved the intricacy of these stories. Sometimes they echoed among each other faintly and other times there were direct and intriguing allusions. Figuring out why they all held together was part of the fun. Warning, it does get off to a slow start...

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stuhrr , January 31, 2010
Mitchell's writing is incredible and changes with the time and place of the narrative, which moves forward and backwards in time. With themes of imperialism, human dignity, commodification, consumerism, and environmental catastrophe, Mitchell takes the reader into despair, but leaves her (or him) with a tiny taste of hope. This book was enthusiastically recommended to me and I want to do the same. If you are reader, read this book.

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bluegeorge , January 24, 2010
Cloud Atlas sits next to my autographed copy of Barry White's biography. Enough said.

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KatieR , January 16, 2010 (view all comments by KatieR)
Typo correction: Mitchell effortlessly blends 6(!) stories together. A wonderful journey. A wonderful read.

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KatieR , January 16, 2010 (view all comments by KatieR)
Mitchell effortlessly blends 4 stories together. A wonderful journey. A wonderful read.

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Deborah Diers , January 14, 2010 (view all comments by Deborah Diers)
Totally original. Totally unexpected. Totally satisfying. To a person, everyone who has read on my recommendation raves. A book I will go back to again and again.

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rachel.smith.anderson , January 13, 2010 (view all comments by rachel.smith.anderson)
Best book of the decade, in my opinion.

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JeffMoniker , January 09, 2010
Fans of Murakami, Chabon and Lethem should enjoy this masterful blending of genres, consisting of 6 separate narratives, seemingly disparate, but somehow Mitchell manages to coalesce them all into a mysterious whole.

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Jacob Silverman , January 08, 2010
A wonderful, wide-ranging, fearlessly original book that earns the overused moniker "tour de force."

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jcard , January 08, 2010
A beautiful amalgam of the puzzle, sci-fi, noir, quest, memoir, and thriller genres. It contains stories within stories on every single page. It is Mitchell at his best, which to be honest, is right where he seems to hover whenever he writes fiction. My original copy has been read by no less than a dozen people, friends with a wide variety of tastes, backgrounds, and reading habits. All have enjoyed the novel, and have continued to discuss it, drop it into conversations, and buy copies for themselves (or partners, friends, family, etc.). If you haven't read Mitchell, this is definitely the place to start...it is sprawling, imaginative, prescient fiction from an extremely bright and entertaining author.

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alfbirn , January 07, 2010
The in-bounded structuring of tangentially linked stories that blossom, then close again layer upon layer, era upon era, is almost musical, not in any way forced. Mitchell's ability to appropriate diverse writing styles and inhabit different character voices amazes, though arguably he succeeds more in re-creating historical flourishes and bolting down modern-day plots than in projecting futuristic imagery. A tour de force that far exceeds the promise of his first two novels (also recommended) Ghostwritten and Number 9 Dream.

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Barbara Sears , January 06, 2010
Reading this multi-faceted novel will cultivage new and deep neurological grooves in your brain. Sevral genre's are contained in one wild ride of a story line; science fiction, historical adventure, mystery thriller, comedy. This one-of-a-kind book is one that you will finish, ponder, and then read again.

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Audrey Bekeny , January 06, 2010
David Mitchell displays an incredible breadth of writing styles in the interwoven tales of Cloud Atlas, with a mastery in each one, while simultaneously drawing the reader in through a succession of concentric -- and yet far-removed, both geographically and temporally -- intrigues. This book is a finely woven tapestry of words.

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themerk , January 04, 2010
This collection of six related stories defies categorization, but if you're a fan of David Mitchell's, rest assured you will love this one too. I consider it his best to date. Each story takes place in a different time period, with different characters, but all the narratives are brought together towards the end of the book to show the interconnectedness of the stories, how one inevitably leads to the next, and the next, and so on. Pure genius. A little sci-fi toward the end with robots and such, but wholly enjoyable. I am nominating this book for the "best book of the decade" prize. There is nothing else that even comes close and, as a librarian, I read quite a bit so that's saying a lot. While I don't remember every detail of all the story lines, I can tell you that, on the whole, this book has stayed on my mind from the moment I finished it about 5 years ago and I look forward to revisiting it someday soon.

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Marcella Barnes , January 03, 2010
Who would have though that 10 years from Y2K we'd be where we are now? We do not live in the futuristic world so many thought would be here and yet we have experienced advancements unimagined for our time. Of my reading in the past ten years, no novel other than has reflected this conundrum more authentically than "Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell. Through both his style and creative content, Mitchell captures the complexity of human time- our past, present, and future- as well as how we understand and move through it. He borrows from multiple styles and writes in them with the authority of their greats, including Dickens and Orson Scott Card to name just two. Structurally interesting, touching and powerful, "Cloud Atlas" is a book that is both timely and timeless. It is a perfect read when looking to get lost, to identify, to understand, to reflect, and when standing on the precipice of a new decade.

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jlgill , January 03, 2010 (view all comments by jlgill)
When asked to name the best book I read in the last decade, this one came to mind immediately. It had some fierce competition from the likes of Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy, but several things about Cloud Atlas make it stand out as a singularly important novel. The author not only masters six distinct voices in six different periods, but does so using five different narrative techniques; the Victorian travel journal of a barrister in the Pacific, the letters from a bisexual expatriot composer to his lover, a mystery novel set in the 1970's, the memoirs of an aged publisher's escape from a home for the elderly, the interviews of a near-future clone bred to work in fast-food in the Korean "corpocracy," and the far-future oral history of a post-apocalyptic Hawaiian islander. In lesser hands the result could have been a lot of heat but no light, but Cloud Atlas evokes Nietzche's Eternal Return, weaving narratives together to explore the very nature of Being.

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kattinthebookself , February 28, 2009
David Mitchell hands us a work to a praised with Cloud Atlas. Each character and setting we are introduced to comes with thier own genre and conflict. Themed towards power struggles and the dangerous path humanity is on, it's a read that almost any audience can enjoy. On the surface, six short novellas that can be read for simple escapism. Deeper, it's the Bible meets Blackadder meets humanistic values. While I struggle to write a comprehensive summary (you almost forget the plot of the first by the time you reach the sixth) it's a book worth reading, if not adding to your bookself.

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teek , August 31, 2008 (view all comments by teek)
This book drove me crazy. I would just get into the characters and plot when the author would switch to a different storyline. So then you are perplexed to read it accordingly or skip to the chapter of the characters you like. However, each plot slowly relates to the other, so you just can't. It really is such an original book with realistic tones from the past to the distant future. Plus the author added themes and character complexity.

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Kirstin , March 04, 2008
A jaw-droppingly brilliant novel that offers both virtuosic literary prowess and real soul. The structure is fascinating, the several genre styles pitch-perfect, and the plot fascinating and affecting. I won't spoil this book's many delights by revealing specifics. Mitchell is one of our most talented living writers, and Cloud Atlas is a book well worth reading.

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Samsara , December 30, 2006 (view all comments by Samsara)
It's impossible to give a coherent summary of this book since in actuality there are 6 plots, with 6 entirely different narrative styles. And each of them will have you divided: on the one hand, you want to turn the page and discover what happens next. On the other hand, you want to reread each line, keeping the taste of his words on your tongue as long as possible. I think my vocabulary tripled from reading this book. So did my capacity for hope. Read it. Now.

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cjmalcolm , October 13, 2006 (view all comments by cjmalcolm)
I read Cloud Atlas during the summer of 2005 and found it remarkable in terms of structure, imagination, detail, character and plot development. The author switches perspectives with ease which makes me scratch my head in wonder compared to your standard 'parallel plot-line fiction which ties it all together by the final page' book discussion club pick. Am uncertain that my group will be able to cut a wide swath through the plot-lines in the limited time which they have(a month, and a busy one) but will be proud to present such a unique book to my unsuspecting friends!Memorable read. Oct.13,2006

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Product Details

ISBN:
9780375507250
Binding:
Trade Paperback
Publication date:
08/17/2004
Publisher:
PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE
Pages:
528
Height:
1.13IN
Width:
5.51IN
Thickness:
1.25
Number of Units:
1
Copyright Year:
2004
UPC Code:
2800375507252
Author:
David Mitchell
Author:
David Mitchell
Subject:
General Fiction
Subject:
Fantasy fiction
Subject:
Fate and fatalism
Subject:
Literature-A to Z

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