Cloud Atlas

a novel

by

509 pages

English language

Published Nov. 11, 2004 by Random House Trade Paperbacks.

ISBN:
978-0-375-50725-0
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5 stars (6 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 …

6 editions

reviewed Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Review of 'Cloud Atlas' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

I liked following the different stories and bouncing back and forth between them. I'm not totally sure what the thread that wove them all together was, but the individual stories kept me reading and the book as a whole was fun to read. Having seen the movie before reading the books, I had already formulated pictures of what all the characters looked like, which was probably helpful since there were many to keep track of.

reviewed Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Review of 'Cloud Atlas' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

I can start this review by saying I was blown away, what a ride this novel was! It contains six unique stories that are interconnected. Every story is set in a different period, written in a different styles, like six different novels. We start with a 19th century seafaring story set in the Pacific, move on to a letter-style story set in Belgium in the 1930s. From there we move on to a political thriller with a compelling female protagonist in the 70s, a tragicomedy of a fairly unlikeable British guy trapped in a nursing home in our era, to fully blown dystopia set in Korea, to post-apocalypse in Hawaii, and then all the way back.

Like most dystopia, ultimately a depressing read, as the interconnected strands of story show that humans are pretty much terrible, and thirst for power, greed, it destroys, until there's almost nothing left. And even …

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4 stars
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Subjects

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