Cloud Atlas

a novel

509 pages

English language

Published March 26, 2004 by Random House Trade Paperbacks.

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4 stars (2 reviews)

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; an ambitious journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing the mendicant and violent family of his star author; 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 …

5 editions

reviewed Cloud atlas. by David Mitchell

Review of 'Cloud atlas.' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Cloud Atlas is an ambitious book. It tells six stories spanning what is probably close to four centuries across almost as many continents and vastly differing narrative styles. On top of this, each successive story is contained within the previous one, and you start all six before you finish any of them, and then finish them each in reverse order. It is certainly a complex, intriguing way to tell stories.

But ambition must be matched by achievement, and my four-word review of Cloud Atlas has been "Good, but not great." And that's what it is - it's a good read, and certainly enjoyable. But it aimed for a lot, and I didn't feel like it quite made it there. The six stories were loosely tied together, but they seldom felt unified or really connected, and more often felt like Mitchell realized in the last few pages that he hadn't mentioned …

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Leo

rated it

4 stars

Subjects

  • Fate and fatalism -- Fiction
  • Reincarnation -- Fiction