Cloud Atlas

In my head, there’s a high I’m chasing, and it’s the high I got when I finally finished David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, the high of one synapse in my head connecting with one another in a bright feverish spark as I volley from one page to the next, one character to the next, one era to the next.

If I had to summarise what the book even is, I’d say it’s reincarnation and samsara in the hands of Mitchell’s trademark ventriloquism, arranged into this wonderfully nested set of Russian doll narratives. It sounds very smart and full of grand ideas… show more.

Cloud Atlas isn’t an easy read, that’s for sure.

It’s difficult at times to keep track of the characters, the timeframes, and the geographical settings. It wanders through the genres from contemporary fiction to historical fiction to sci-fi to classic mystery. And what a puzzle to work out how the characters and the stories are all connected!

But it’s so engaging, so different, so inventive that it kept me glued to the book for more than 500 pages. Do give it a try.

No other book could come first on this list, because this was the book that changed my entire perspective on what speculative fiction could be. When I first picked up this book as a high school student, I had never seen anything like it: six loosely connected stories, a clever nesting-doll structure, a unique blend of sci-fi, mystery, and historical fiction. Most importantly, Cloud Atlas is, like all David Mitchell books, full of empathy and hope. Even the bleakest and most brutal storylines offer moments of grace, suggesting that, even if we can’t always save ourselves, we have the ability… show more.

Those who have read this book understand why it belongs in a class all its own. It takes a lot of effort to get into a novel. Mitchell is such a badass yarn spinner that he bates you into 6; before finishing them off in rapid succession. The second half of Cloud Atlas is pure, unadulterated, hard-earned joy that you have to be a real reader to appreciate. That Mitchell nails the arc of the whole group of stories, at the same time each one is finding its own meaning and climax, is frankly hard to describe.

Admittedly, Cloud Atlas isn’t for everyone. But for readers who appreciate the beauty of language, Mitchell’s epic is a literary marvel. Part historical fiction, part Sci-Fi, Cloud Atlas weaves a parable spanning generations of human history. Through the eyes of his varied protagonists, who may or may not be the same reincarnated soul, Mitchell demonstrates the failings and triumphs of humanity. It’s a book that’ll make you question everything you think you know, and it might just make you a better person. 

Is Cloud Atlas scary? Not so much. But if you look between the lines at the bigger story being told, the future is bleak and the place we are rocketing toward as a society might just look a little like the horrifying future imagined here by David Mitchell. The merging of genres and the variety of POVs make for an unforgettable read.

I love music and I love interconnected plots. This story unwinds just like an onion. The layers upon layers of this novel are a spectacle to behold.

This is an epic read, a huge tome of a book that tackles the past, the future, the environment, and human nature by segueing six stories together, over-layering them, making clever connections between them, in a way that leaves me breathless every time I read it.

The title alone is intriguing. Normally, the atlas is a static depiction of the world and the viewer moves through it either by turning the pages or by travel. But in Cloud Atlas the clouds move and the viewer remains the fixed point. In this way, history passes before our eyes and metamorphoses into… show more.

A gleaming futuristic dystopia and a post-apocalyptic Hawaii are just two of the times and places in which this mind-bogglingly ambitious novel takes place. When my dad died a few years ago, this book reminded me that our lives extend beyond our lives in ways we can’t possibly imagine. It was comforting. Oh, also, I’m super jealous of David Mitchell as a writer: seems like you’d need at least six reincarnated lifetimes to get that good.

A twenty-first-century classic and a triumph of storytelling, form and first-class writing. Six interlinked stories, connected by narrators bearing a similar tattoo, are set in sequence between 1849 and 2346. Each is written in a different style and genre and presented in two halves, except for the central, linking chapter. The chapter sequence moves from the past to the future and back to the past.

The story themes included colonial past and misdeeds in the Pacific, musical biography, a mystery thriller, a comic kidnapping, an uprising of clones and a vision of the future written in an imagined dialect.

Cloud Atlas invites so many different kinds of readers into its tent. It’s a historical fiction (or, really, several historical fictions); it’s a social novel; it’s a science-fiction novel; and, most importantly to many readers, it’s a trick-box novel with a structure that Mitchell seems to be inventing from scratch. The book’s six nested stories—each of which is interrupted at a pivotal moment—travel across centuries, but there’s a sense that something singular moves through each text. The way the book can satisfy at the level of plot while maintaining a sense that the world you see is not all that… show more.