Cloud Atlas

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year

Mitchell's almost comically ambitious novel is indeed a kind of cumulus: a wild and woolly condensation of ideas, styles and far-flung milieus whose only true commonality is the reincarnated soul at its center. The book's six nesting narratives - from 1850s New Zealand through 1930s Belgium, groovy California, recent-ish England, dystopian Korea and Hawaii - also often feel like a postmodern puzzle-box that whirls and clicks as its great world(s) spin, throwing off sparks of pulp, philosophy and fervid humanism

Remarkable . . . it knits together science fiction, political thriller and historical pastiche with musical virtuosity and linguistic exuberance

An impeccable dance of genres . . . an elegiac, radiant festival of prescience, meditation and entertainment

His wildest ride yet . . . a singular achievement , from an author of extraordinary ambition and skill

David Mitchell entices his readers onto a rollercoaster , and at first they wonder if they want to get off. Then - at least in my case - they can't bear the journey to end

A magnificent tour de force

A glorious puzzle for the reader . . . Mitchell's storytelling in Cloud Atlas is of the best

An impeccably structured novel of ideas in many voices

A novel of breathtaking ambition and scale, spanning continents, oceans and centuries

Funny, exciting, imaginative and energetic

A virtuoso performance . . . deeply impressive

The way Mitchell inhabits the different voices of the novel is close to miraculous . . . No other British novelist, to my mind, combines such a darkly futuristic intelligence with such polyphonic ease

His most accomplished achievement to date . . . a novel in the biggest, most exhilarating sense

Gloriously inventive and dazzlingly virtuosic

A thrilling ride of a story

Tremendous . . . one of the most shamelessly exciting books imaginable

Stunning . . . One of those rare books that manages to be enormously clever while resisting the temptation to show off

Reassuringly excellent

Engrossing

Mitchell writes as though at the helm of some perpetual dream machine, can evidently do anything, and his ambition is written in magma across this novel's every page

This isn't just one brilliant book, it's a collection of six completely different brilliant books

Mind-bogglingly good

One of those how-the-holy-hell-did-he-do-it? modern classics that no doubt is - and should be - read by any student of contemporary literature

Astonishing . . . essential fiction for the 21st century

Not just dazzling, amusing, or clever but heartbreaking and passionate, too. I've never read anything quite like it

An intense, arcing colossus of a book whose narrative links, supplied by the voices of six main characters, are spun out into a unified theory of everything: history, human evolution, science, the will to power. The voices span epochs, continents, and genres . . . Mitchell has rightly commanded attention for the sheer breadth and energy of his composition . . . I am moved by (his) talent

It takes only a few pages of any part of this masterful feast of a novel to make you want to read the rest

David Mitchell may well be possessed of genius . . . As well-plotted, entertaining narrative, Cloud Atlas succeeds on many levels. As political and cultural fable, with an unerring humanist sense of the dangerous will to power that lies at the dark heart of man, it's visionary

As mind-bending in its ideas as it is accessible on the page . . . It pretty much resists hyperbole simply by being better than you'd ever dare hope

Gorgeous and life-affirming

David Mitchell is the author of the novels Ghostwritten , number9dream , Cloud Atlas , Black Swan Green , The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet , The Bone Clocks , Slade House and Utopia Avenue . He has been shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize, won the World Fantasy Award, and the John Llewellyn Rhys, Geoffrey Faber Memorial and South Bank Show Literature Prizes, among others. In 2018, he won the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, given in recognition of a writer's entire body of work. His screenwriting credits include the TV shows Pachinko and Sense8 , and the movie Matrix: Resurrections .

In addition, David Mitchell together with KA Yoshida has translated from Japanese two autism memoirs by Naoki Higashida: The Reason I Jump and Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight .

He lives in Ireland.