'Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies ...' A reluctant voyager crossing the
Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in
between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan's
California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; 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. In his extraordinary third novel, David
Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation
on humanity's dangerous will to