The Bone Clocks

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014 One drowsy summer's day in 1984, teenage runaway Holly Sykes encounters a strange woman who offers a small kindness in exchange for 'asylum'. Decades will pass before Holly understands exactly what sort of asylum the woman was seeking . . . The Bone Clocks follows the twists and turns of Holly's life from a scarred adolescence in Gravesend to old age on Ireland's Atlantic coast as Europe's oil supply dries up - a life not so far out of the ordinary, yet punctuated by flashes of precognition, visits from people who emerge from thin air and brief lapses in the laws of reality. For Holly Sykes - daughter, sister, mother, guardian - is also an unwitting player in a murderous feud played out in the shadows and margins of our world, and may prove to be its decisive weapon. Metaphysical thriller, meditation on mortality and chronicle of our self-devouring times, this kaleidoscopic novel crackles with the invention and wit that have made David Mitchell one of the most celebrated writers of his generation. Here is fiction at its most spellbinding and memorable best.

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 and Slade House. He has won the John Llewellyn Rhys, Geoffrey Faber Memorial and South Bank Show Literature Prizes, and been shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize. In 2003, David Mitchell was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.

Review :
Something truly fantastical: an epic in many voices featuring supernatural beings, rips in reality and a global battle between good and evil. Yet Mitchell's superlative prose makes this much more than a tall tale: the novel also takes in family love and loss, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and a horribly plausible near-future in which the end of oil is catapulting the world towards barbarism . . . It's a globe-trotting, mind-bending, hair-raising triumph, already sitting pretty on the Booker longlist. - Guardian Mitchell has a vigorous, shape-shifting imagination, and his pen tracks his thoughts with extraordinary agility. Moving from place to place, time to time, he can summon up a setting in a line . . . for its experimentation, humour, hybrid energy, and sheer narrative pleasure, The Bone Clocks compels admiration. - Evening Standard Mitchell is a consummate craftsman . . . For sci-fi fantasists, the imaginary world Mitchell creates might be a thing of wonder, a Dungeons and Dragons for literate grown-ups. For others, I suspect the flesh and blood anguish of a long life lived well against the odds will prove the greater pleasure. - Independent Mitchell's mesmerizing saga is evidence of the power of story to transport us, and even to stop time entirely. - Vanity Fair : "MMitchell's vision of the future may be bleak, but the force of his storytelling made The Bone Clocks a joy - Time Australia, Number Two in Best Fiction of 2014 A A globe-trotting kaleidoscope that covers both ancient and new ground, The Bone Clocks is fiction at its most spellbinding - MiNDFOOD