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Cloud Atlas
A Novel
by David Mitchell


9.4

based on 24 reviews
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based on 20 votes
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Black Swan Green

Official Publisher Site

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 Reagans 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 others echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small. [Random House]

Random House Trade, 528 pages
08/17/2004
$14.95

ISBN: 0375507256

Fiction
General Literature & Fiction

NOTES:
Shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize.

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

Boston Globe John Freeman

One of the biggest joys of Cloud Atlas is watching Mitchell sashay from genre to genre without a hitch in his dance step. If you are a fantasy reader or a thriller reader, a fan of epistolary novels or even a reader of journals, Cloud Atlas maintains a thrilling level of authenticity throughout.

Kirkus Reviews

Sheer storytelling brilliance. Mitchell really is his generation's Pynchon.

New York Observer Adam Begley

Hugely entertaining and vastly ambitious, David Mitchell's third novel, Cloud Atlas, is tailor-made for a reader with eclectic tastes.

Salon Laura Miller

A genuine and thoroughly entertaining literary puzzle...What "Cloud Atlas" lacks in originality it makes up for in powerful, fluent storytelling.

San Francisco Chronicle Tom Barbash

A remarkable achievement, a frightening, beautiful, funny, wildly inventive, elaborately conceived tour de force.

The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Charles Foran

Here is a dome so grand, and so ornately decorated, that one has trouble appreciating its entirety without causing neck damage. Still, it is a pleasure to sit inside such an edifice, and to marvel. Repeat visits are in order. Each time, a little more structure is revealed. Each time, the space grow less intimidating. Until, finally, it is just a book, one that you are reading with amazement and delight.

The Guardian Hephzibah Anderson

A novel in the biggest, most exhilarating sense...As with the most perplexing dreams and riddling rides, Cloud Chamber courteously sets us down where we began, but I surely won't be the only reader turning straight back to the first page and starting all over again.

The Guardian AS Byatt

Powerful and elegant because of Mitchell's understanding of the way we respond to those fundamental and primitive stories we tell about good and evil, love and destruction, beginnings and ends. He isn't afraid to jerk tears or ratchet up suspense - he understands that's what we make stories for.

The Independent Matt Thorne

A singular achievement, from an author of extraordinary ambition and skill, setting himself challenges that would drive most authors to madness. For the third time in a row, Mitchell has excelled himself. It is almost frightening to contemplate where he might go next.

The Independent Lawrence Norfolk

An exorbitant artistic effort has yielded an overwhelming literary creation...Good storytelling is compulsive, coercive - a form of tyranny itself. Mitchell's storytelling in Cloud Atlas is of the best. I was, appropriately, captivated.

The New Yorker

Virtuosic.

The Spectator Philip Hensher

One of the most shamelessly exciting books imaginable...It is very rare to come across a novel so ruthlessly planned, and yet so unconfined by its formal decisions, so unpredictable in its direction, so convincing even at its strangest, so capable of doing anything to serve its extraordinary ends.

Washington Post Jeff Turrentine

All of these influences, and countless others, gel into a work that nevertheless manages to be completely original. More significantly, the various pieces of David Mitchell's mysterious puzzle combine to form a haunting image that stays with the reader long after the book has been closed.

Review Of Contemporary Fiction Richard J. Murphy

This book gives the reader full value and then some... What Mitchell has provided certainly makes for the most interesting reading experience I have had since Danielewski’s House of Leaves.

Los Angeles Times Carmela Ciuraru

Grand and elaborate as it is, Cloud Atlas offers too many powerful insights to be dismissed as a mere exercise in style.

Village Voice Jessica Winter

So long as the heads are still popping off Mitchell's Russian doll like champagne corks, his novel glows with a fizzy, dizzy energy, pregnant with possibility and whispering in your ear: Listen closely to a story, any story, and you'll hear another story kicking inside it, eager to meet the world.

Publishers Weekly

Readers who enjoy the "novel as puzzle" will find much to savor in this original and occasionally very entertaining work.

Chicago Tribune Art Winslow

Some of Mitchell's sections are quite brilliant and moving, while a couple devolve to the pedestrian, marring the overall effect of the novel.

Flak Scott Esposito

The thing that transforms Cloud Atlas from just another dull book to a maddening quandary is Mitchell's prose, which is radiant. The chasm between Mitchell's ideas and his prose is as wide and troubling as the San Andreas fault. How can a book be so incredibly well done and yet have so little to say?

Entertainment Weekly Troy Patterson

Mitchell's talents for riotous incident and energetic prose keep the pages turning, but 'Atlas' disparate strands are linked only by the flimsiest of pretenses...The six cylinders never function as one engine.

Library Journal Marc Kloszewski

There are patches of rough sledding; while the clever construction serves to highlight the novel's big ideas, the continual interruptions may distance the average reader.

The Onion A.V. Club Andy Battaglia

Cloud Atlas strains as it attempts to gather itself under an umbrella full of holes...The conceit matches its ambition in parts, but a few wobbly chapters show the seams of an awkward welding job.

Daily Telegraph Theo Tait

In short, Cloud Atlas spends half its time wanting to be "The Simpsons" and the other half the Bible. Even for David Mitchell, that's a difficult balancing act to pull off.

The New York Times Book Review Tim Bissell

On one hand, Mitchell's strategy is boldly antithetical to what most narrative-driven novels have been up to since Cervantes. On the other hand, what Mitchell is doing is basically James Michener's "Alaska" with an I.Q. transplant...The novel is frustrating not because it is too smart but because it is not nearly as smart as its author.

The average user rating for this book is 9.4 (out of 10) based on 20 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

[Anonymous] gave it a10:
Excellent. It takes a while to get used to the stories...once you get started on one, it cuts off and you're taken through another tale at another point in time.... but once they tie in together, the book is inspiring. the best part about the book, you remember it after you put it down...not something you read and move on afterwards....teaches about life, religion, acceptance and understanding. absolutely beautiful.

Pranav D gave it a10:
Virtuoso, brilliant, and a stunning tapestry of human emotions. Brilliant!

Mark P gave it a10:
What a writer. Mitchell has shown more skill and more ambition than anyone I've read recently.

Bill H gave it a10:
Wonderful book. May, as some say, not have a huge amount to say and for some the start is difficult to engage with, but the story is a gripping and incredibly imaginative journey. Very enjoyable to read and that after all should be what matters most.

Bob R gave it a10:
Beautifully written puzzle of interlocking stories, each contained as an artifact within the following story, encapsulated further in the future. Six tales altogether, each in a different style, brilliantly evoking another world and genre. Mitchell has created something new and serious, as well as entertaining, with the forward propulsion of a thriller and the thoughtfulness of serious literature.

Alex M gave it a10:
A wonderful and thought provoking book on the big themes of our time - or any time. Brilliantly stitched together, and dazzling in its variety of narrative voices. Superbly intelligent fiction.

Andrew T gave it a10:
Virtuoso. Philosophy that reads like a thriller. A love song to the humanity that creates and is crushed by civilization. Like "Intolerance", stories set in different times are woven together in a tapestry, thrilling and gorgeous. The smartest book that wouldn't work at all if it wasn't also extremely moving in each of its sections. Mitchell pulls you into the dilemmas of each of the characters so quickly, you don't have time to be thrown by the jolts in the time-space continuum. But don't worry- all is wrapped up as brilliantly as in Dickens. Wow, wow, and wow- a mind blower.

Cloud Atlas A Novel by David Mitchell

Cloud Atlas
A Novel
by David Mitchell