Book

Cloud atlas : a novel / David Mitchell.

ISBN: 9780345807472 (pbk.)
Physical Description: 514 pages ; 22 cm
Edition: Vintage Canada ed., 2012.
Publisher: Toronto : Vintage Canada, 2012.
Copyright: &copy;2004.

Mitchell, David (David Stephen), (author.).

Summary:

Weaves history, science, suspense, humor & pathos through six separate but loosely related narratives. Each of the narratives is set in a different time and place, each is written in a different prose style, each is broken off mid-action and brought to conclusion in the second half of the book. Among the volume's most engaging story lines is a witty 1930s-era chronicle, via letters, of a young musician's effort to become an amanuensis for a renowned, blind composer & a hilarious account of a modern-day vanity publisher who is institutionalized by a stroke and plans a madcap escape in order to return to his literary empire (such as it is).

A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific Ocean in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in Belgium between the First and Second World Wars; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan's California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; the testament of 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.