About the Book
By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks - Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize A postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in twenty-first-century fiction, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian love of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending, philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction as profound as it is playful. In this groundbreaking novel, an influential favorite among a new generation of writers, Mitchell explores with daring artistry fundamental questions of reality and identity.
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, contrives 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, with dazzling virtuosity, 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 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.
As wild as a videogame, 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.
List of Readers:
The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, read by Scott Brick
Letters From Zedelghem, read by Richard Matthews
Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery, read by Cassandra Campbell
The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, read by John Lee
An Orison of Sonmi 451, read by Kim Mai Guest
Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After, read by Kirby Heyborne
From the Audiobook Download edition.
About the Author :
David Mitchell is the award-winning and bestselling author of The Bone Clocks, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Black Swan Green, Cloud Atlas, Number9Dream, and Ghostwritten. Twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Mitchell was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time in 2007. With KA Yoshida, Mitchell translated from the Japanese the internationally bestselling memoir The Reason I Jump. He lives in Ireland with his wife and two children. From the Hardcover edition.
Review :
"Cloud Atlas is, obviously, a formidable creation. . . . Fellow novelists will find it hard not to heap . . . praise on David Mitchell, whose brilliance takes one's breath away in a manner not unlike a first experience of Chartres or the Duomo."
--"The Globe and Mail
""Cloud Atlas is a head rush, both action-packed and chillingly ruminative."
--"People"
"Mitchell's range is astonishing, moving effortlessly from elegant genre fiction to satire to high-end literary pyrotechnics....to Mitchell -- prodigiously skilled and gloriously ambitious -- I can only say, bravo!"
--"Toronto Star
""Cloud Atlas""imposes a dizzying series of milieus, characters and conflicts upon us . . . [and] feels like a doggedly expert gloss on various writers and modes."
--"The New York Times"
"Audacious, dazzling.... Readers who enjoy the 'novel as puzzle' will find much to savor in this original and occasionally very entertaining work."
--"Publishers Weekly
""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
Advance UK reviews for "Cloud Atlas"
"the third novel from the genre-busting David Mitchell, author of""Ghostwritten and the Booker-shortlisted Number9Dream is a remarkable book, made up of six resonating strands; the narrative reaches back into the 19th century, to colonialism and savagery in the Pacific islands, and forwards into a dark future, beyond the collapse of civilisation. 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, " Guardian," Preview o
[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 Atlasought 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 inCloud Atlasis 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 From the Hardcover edition."
"[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
From the Hardcover edition.