Book Review: "Cloud Atlas"

David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (which I read in the new flipback edition from Hodder & Stoughton) is an imaginative and well-designed novel. Told in six very different sub-novels, each with an extremely different perspective, narrator, time period, and linguistic style, Cloud Atlas proceeds chronologically forward from the 1850s through the distant, post-apocalyptic future with the first half of each sub-novel, and then moves back through time through the second half of each. While the loose connections between the sections seem slightly contrived at times, Mitchell's ability to use a variety of different genres and voices made it well worth the read.

While I enjoyed a couple of the sub-novels better than the others (the series of letters from an ambitious young composer and an elderly British publisher's harebrained escape from his nursing home were my favorites), seeing how the entire work came together was great fun.