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 Cloud AtlasAbout the Book: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 civilisation — 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.
Praise:“[Mitchell’s] exuberant, Nabokovian delight in word play; his provocative grapplings with the great unknowables; and most of all his masterful storytelling: All coalesce to make Cloud Atlas an exciting, almost overwhelming masterpiece.” “[Mitchell’s] language crackles with texture and bite.” “Hugely entertaining . . . a surfeit of narrative ingenuity.” “Mitchell’s talent for riotous incident and energetic prose keep the pages turning.” “[Mitchell’s] most audacious work . . . a wild, wonderful ride.” “[Cloud Atlas] glows with a fizzy, dizzy energy, pregnant with possibility and whispering in your ear: Listen closely to a story, any story, and you’ll hear another story inside it, eager to meet the world.” “Exhilarating, elegant, and accomplished . . . Cloud Atlas is a narrative about the act of narration, the ability of storytelling to shape our sense of history, civilization, and selfhood.” “Mitchell has a gift for creating fully realized worlds with a varied cast of characters.” ”[Like] Haruki Murakami, Mitchell mixes highbrow concerns with pulp content for maximum reading pleasure.” “Cloud Atlas is such an astounding feat that it’s tempting to think there must be several David Mitchells, each of whom wrote one part of this book.” “Stunning . . . Mitchell has a gift with language. [His] exploration of power and greed is riveting.” “Audacious, sprawling, preposterously ambitious . . . Next time someone suggests that The Novel is endangered, hit him with this one. Hard.” “Revolutionary . . . Cloud Atlas brilliantly puzzles out the way things might not have been.” “Astonishing . . . The way Mitchell inhabits the different voices is close to miraculous.” “A remarkable book . . . It knits together science fiction, political thriller and historical pastiche with musical virtuosity and linguistic exuberance.” “A cornucopia, an elegiac, radiant festival of prescience, meditation, and entertainment. Open up Mitchell’s head and a whole ecstatic symphony of inventiveness and ideas will fly out as if from a benign and felicitious Pandora’s box.”
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David Mitchell is the acclaimed author of the novels Black Swan Green, which was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by Time; Cloud Atlas, which was a Man Booker Prize finalist; Number9Dream, which was short-listed for the Man Booker as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; and Ghostwritten, awarded the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for best book by a writer under thirty-five and short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. He lives in Ireland.
