3.5
Cloud Atlas (20th Anniversary Edition)
By David Mitchell & Gabrielle ZevinPublisher Description
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A new edition of the timeless, structure-bending classic that explores how actions of individual lives impact the past, present and future—from a postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in fiction
Features a new afterword by David Mitchell and a new introduction by Gabrielle Zevin, author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize
Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. The novel careens, with dazzling virtuosity, to Belgium in 1931, to the West Coast in the 1970s, 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 even there. The novel boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, David Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across 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.
Features a new afterword by David Mitchell and a new introduction by Gabrielle Zevin, author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize
Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. The novel careens, with dazzling virtuosity, to Belgium in 1931, to the West Coast in the 1970s, 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 even there. The novel boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, David Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across 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.
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3.5
Ava (NO REREADS)
Created 12 days agoShare
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“Welp. That must be the lowest rating I ever put on any David Mitchell's book. But I need to be honest with myself : cloud atlas lost me. It's a little bit too much infos, and timelines and characters and the intricacies between these characters and stories is not always so evident and easy to follow. Unfortunately that made the experience a bit disappointing :( really liked some bits of it and I remember the movie fondly so it's easy to picture how scenes could look like. But the book itself is too heavy for 1 read. Or 2. I'd need several to fully catch the story behind it all”
edenprose
Created 14 days agoShare
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DeDeInZimm
Created 29 days agoShare
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“I so wanted to love this book since the movie intrigued me - just - no.”
KennyGayle
Created 29 days agoShare
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About David Mitchell
David Mitchell is the author of the novels Ghostwritten, Number9Dream, Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, The Bone Clocks, Slade House, and Utopia Avenue. He has been shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize and has won the John Llewellyn Rhys, Geoffrey Faber Memorial, and South Bank Show literature prizes, as well as the World Fantasy Award. In 2018, he received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, given in recognition of a writer’s entire body of work. In addition, David Mitchell together with KA Yoshida has translated from the Japanese two books by Naoki Higashida: The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism and Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A Young Man’s Voice from the Silence of Autism. Born in 1969, Mitchell grew up in Worcestershire and, after graduating from university, spent several years teaching English in Japan. He now lives in Ireland with his wife and their two children.
Other books by David Mitchell
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