Price of the new book: €14.15
A postmodern visionary who is also a master of genre styles, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian tradition of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for the revision of the philosophical and scientific mind in the tradition of Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction as profound as it is playful. Now in his new novel, David Mitchell explores with daring artistry fundamental questions of reality and identity.
Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary, moving from Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing falls in love with a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins treating 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 into a web of corporate strike 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 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 her silly characters connect, how their fantasies intertwine, and how their souls drift through time like clouds across the sky.
As wild as a video game, 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.
