Authors: David Mitchell
ISBN-13: 9780375507250, ISBN-10: 0375507256
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Date Published: August 2004
Edition: First U.S. Edition
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.
In this audacious and dazzling novel, Mitchell weaves history, science, humor, and suspense through six separate but related narratives, each set in a different time and place, each written in a different prose style, and each broken mid-action only to be concluded in the second half of the book. One of the more engaging stories is set in 1930s and told via letters describing a young musician's effort to become an amanuenisis for a renowned, blind composer. Another focuses on a book editor who fins himself accidentally imprisoned in a home for the elderly.
Hopscotching over centuries, Cloud Atlas likewise jumps in and out of half a dozen different styles, all of which display the author's astonishing talent for ventriloquism, and end up fitting together to make this a highly satisfying, and unusually thoughtful, addition to the expanding "puzzle book" genre.