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Outstanding
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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.
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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
Sheer storytelling brilliance. Mitchell really is his generation's Pynchon.
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Outstanding
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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.
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Outstanding
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Salon Laura Miller
A genuine and thoroughly entertaining literary puzzle...What "Cloud Atlas" lacks in originality it makes up for in powerful, fluent storytelling.
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Outstanding
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San Francisco Chronicle Tom Barbash
A remarkable achievement, a frightening, beautiful, funny, wildly inventive, elaborately conceived tour de force.
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Outstanding
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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.
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Outstanding
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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.
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Outstanding
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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.
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Outstanding
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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.
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Outstanding
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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.
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Outstanding
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The New Yorker
Virtuosic.
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Outstanding
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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.
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Outstanding
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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.
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Outstanding
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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.
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Favorable
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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.
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Favorable
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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.
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Favorable
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Publishers Weekly
Readers who enjoy the "novel as puzzle" will find much to savor in this original and occasionally very entertaining work.
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Favorable
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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.
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Favorable
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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?
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Mixed
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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.
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Mixed
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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.
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Mixed
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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.
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Unfavorable
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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.
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Unfavorable
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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.
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