Ghostwritten (1999) • number9dream (2001) • Cloud Atlas (2004) • Black Swan Green (2006) • The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) • The Reason I Jump (English translation, with KA Yoshida, of Naoki Higashida’s memoir, 2013) • The Bone Clocks (2014) • From Me Flows What You Call Time (2014, short story for the Future Library project) • Slade House (2015) • Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8 (English translation, with KA Yoshida, of Naoki Higashida’s memoir, 2017) • “Earthlings” (2018, short story for Oxfam Water Futures), and Utopia Avenue (2020) •
Title: Cloud Atlas
Author: David Mitchell
First Published: 2004, Sceptre an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton (UK)
Present Library Copy: Hodder & Stoughton, 2004
Language: English
Genre: Speculative Literary Fiction
Place of Writing: Hiroshima, Japan (1990s)
Pages: 529
ISBN: 0-340-82277-5
Notes | A hallmark of David Mitchell’s genre-defying style, Cloud Atlas interlaces six narratives across time and space, showcasing his fascination with reincarnation, interconnectedness, and the fragility of civilisation. Ambitious in form and scope, it exemplifies his talent for nesting voices and epochs—an imaginative feat that echoes his Future Library contribution, where storytelling becomes both legacy and prophecy.
“There exists a tribe of ants called the ‘Slave-Maker’. These insects raid the colonies of common ants, steal eggs back to thier own nests, & after they hatch, why, the stolen slaves become workers of the greater empire & don’t even dream they was ever stolen. Now if you ask me, Lord Jehovah crafted these ants as a model, Mr. Ewing, aye, as a map” Mr. Wagstaff’s gaze was gravid with the ancient future. “For them with the eyes to read it”.
A reluctant voyager corssing the Pacific ocean in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in Belgium between the First and Second World Wars; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; the testament of a genetically modified ‘dinery server’ on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisaiton — the narrators of Clous Atlas hear each other’s echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small.
In a novel of mindbending imagination and scope, David Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a captivating meditation on humanity’s dangerous will to power, and where it might lead us .
“A cornucopia, an elegiac, radiant festival of prescience, meditation and entertainment”
Neel Mukherjee, The Times
Neel Mukherjee, The Times