Cloud Atlas - by David Mitchell (Paperback)

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER - The timeless, structure-bending classic that explores how actions of individual lives impact the past, present and future--from a postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in fiction

One of the New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century - Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize - A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Century

Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. The novel careens, with dazzling virtuosity, to Belgium in 1931, to the West Coast in the 1970s, 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 end even there. The novel boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, David Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.

As wild as a video game, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.

Review Quotes

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER
FINALIST FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
A Times (UK) Best Book of the Decade
A New York Times Notable Book
A Globe and Mail 100 Best Book
Longlisted for the IMPAC Award

"[David] Mitchell is, clearly, a genius. He writes as though at the helm of some perpetual dream machine, can evidently do anything, and his ambition is written in magma across this novel's every page."--The New York Times Book Review

"One of those how-the-holy-hell-did-he-do-it? modern classics that no doubt is--and should be--read by any student of contemporary literature."--Dave Eggers

"Wildly entertaining . . . a head rush, both action-packed and chillingly ruminative."--People

"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."--Michael Chabon

"Cloud Atlas ought to make [Mitchell] famous on both sides of the Atlantic as a writer whose fearlessness is matched by his talent."--The Washington Post Book World

"Thrilling . . . One of the biggest joys in Cloud Atlas is watching Mitchell sashay from genre to genre without a hitch in his dance step."--Boston Sunday Globe

"Grand and elaborate . . . [Mitchell] creates a world and language at once foreign and strange, yet strikingly familiar and intimate."--Los Angeles Times

About the Author

David Mitchell is the author of the novels Ghostwritten, Number9Dream, Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, The Bone Clocks, Slade House, and Utopia Avenue. He has been shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize and has won the John Llewellyn Rhys, Geoffrey Faber Memorial, and South Bank Show literature prizes, as well as the World Fantasy Award. In 2018, he received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, given in recognition of a writer's entire body of work. In addition, David Mitchell together with KA Yoshida has translated from the Japanese two books by Naoki Higashida The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism and Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A Young Man's Voice from the Silence of Autism. Born in 1969, Mitchell grew up in Worcestershire and, after graduating from university, spent several years teaching English in Japan. He now lives in Ireland with his wife and their two children.