Cloud Atlas
On sale
19th February 2013
Price: £19.99
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Audiobook Downloadable / ISBN-13: 9781444763768
**Pre-order UTOPIA AVENUE, the spectacular new novel from David Mitchell.**
CLOUD ATLAS, David Mitchell’s bestselling Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novel which was also one of Richard & Judy’s 100 Books of the Decade, has now been adapted for film.
The major motion picture, directed by Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer, and Andy Wachowski, stars Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon, Jim Sturgess, Ben Whishaw, Jim Broadbent Hugo Weaving, Doona Bae, James D’Arcy, Zhou Xun, Keith David and Hugh Grant.
The novel features six characters in interlocking stories, each interrupting the one before it: a reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; 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.
Mitchell’s other novels are GHOSTWRITTEN, NUMBER9DREAM, BLACK SWAN GREEN and A THOUSAND AUTUMS OF JACOB DE ZOET, all published by Sceptre.
http://www.sceptrebooks.com
Facebook: Sceptre Books
Twitter: SceptreBooks
(P)2007 RNIB Publishing
CLOUD ATLAS, David Mitchell’s bestselling Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novel which was also one of Richard & Judy’s 100 Books of the Decade, has now been adapted for film.
The major motion picture, directed by Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer, and Andy Wachowski, stars Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon, Jim Sturgess, Ben Whishaw, Jim Broadbent Hugo Weaving, Doona Bae, James D’Arcy, Zhou Xun, Keith David and Hugh Grant.
The novel features six characters in interlocking stories, each interrupting the one before it: a reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; 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.
Mitchell’s other novels are GHOSTWRITTEN, NUMBER9DREAM, BLACK SWAN GREEN and A THOUSAND AUTUMS OF JACOB DE ZOET, all published by Sceptre.
http://www.sceptrebooks.com
Facebook: Sceptre Books
Twitter: SceptreBooks
(P)2007 RNIB Publishing
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Reviews
A novel of breathtaking ambition and scale, spanning continents, oceans and centuries
The way Mitchell inhabits the different voices of the novel is close to miraculous . . . No other British novelist, to my mind, combines such a darkly futuristic intelligence with such polyphonic ease
His most accomplished achievement to date . . . a novel in the biggest, most exhilarating sense
A virtuoso performance . . . deeply impressive
An intense, arcing colossus of a book whose narrative links, supplied by the voices of six main characters, are spun out into a unified theory of everything: history, human evolution, science, the will to power. The voices span epochs, continents, and genres . . . Mitchell has rightly commanded attention for the sheer breadth and energy of his composition . . . I am moved by (his) talent
Gloriously inventive and dazzlingly virtuosic
A thrilling ride of a story
Funny, exciting, imaginative and energetic
Tremendous . . . one of the most shamelessly exciting books imaginable
A magnificent tour de force
David Mitchell may well be possessed of genius . . . As well-plotted, entertaining narrative, Cloud Atlas succeeds on many levels. As political and cultural fable, with an unerring humanist sense of the dangerous will to power that lies at the dark heart of man, it's visionary
Stunning . . . One of those rare books that manages to be enormously clever while resisting the temptation to show off
Reassuringly excellent
This isn't just one brilliant book, it's a collection of six completely different brilliant books
Engrossing
Mind-bogglingly good
Mitchell writes as though at the helm of some perpetual dream machine, can evidently do anything, and his ambition is written in magma across this novel's every page
One of those how-the-holy-hell-did-he-do-it? modern classics that no doubt is - and should be - read by any student of contemporary literature
Astonishing . . . essential fiction for the 21st century
Not just dazzling, amusing, or clever but heartbreaking and passionate, too. I've never read anything quite like it
It takes only a few pages of any part of this masterful feast of a novel to make you want to read the rest
As mind-bending in its ideas as it is accessible on the page . . . It pretty much resists hyperbole simply by being better than you'd ever dare hope
Mitchell's almost comically ambitious novel is indeed a kind of cumulus: a wild and woolly condensation of ideas, styles and far-flung milieus whose only true commonality is the reincarnated soul at its center. The book's six nesting narratives - from 1850s New Zealand through 1930s Belgium, groovy California, recent-ish England, dystopian Korea and Hawaii - also often feel like a postmodern puzzle-box that whirls and clicks as its great world(s) spin, throwing off sparks of pulp, philosophy and fervid humanism