By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize A postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in twentyfirstcentury fiction David Mitchell combines flatout adventure a Nabokovian love of puzzles a keen eye for character and a taste for mindbending philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco Haruki Murakami and Philip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction as profound as it is playful. In this groundbreaking novel an influential favorite among a new generation of writers Mitchell explores with daring artistry fundamental questions of reality and identity. Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way Ewing is befriended by a physician Dr. Goose who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. . . . Abruptly the action jumps to Belgium in 1931 where Robert Frobisher a disinherited bisexual composer contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. . . . From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life. . . . And onward with dazzling virtuosity to an inglorious presentday England to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok and finally to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history. But the story doesnt end even there. The narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space returning by the same route in reverse to its starting point. Along the way Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect how their fates intertwine and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky. As wild as a videogame as mysterious as a Zen koan Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that like its incomparable author has transcended i