Cloud Atlas is the third novel by British author David Mitchell. Published in 2004, it won the British Book Awards Literary Fiction award and the Richard & Judy Book of the Year award. It was short-listed for the Booker Prize, Nebula Award for Best Novel, and Arthur C. Clarke Award, among other accolades. Unusually, it received awards from both the general literary community and the speculative fiction community. A film adaptation directed by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer, and featuring an ensemble cast, was released in 2012.
The book combines metafiction, historical fiction, contemporary fiction and science fiction, with interconnected nested stories that take the reader from the remote South Pacific in the 19th century to the island of Hawai'i in a distant post-apocalyptic future. Its title was inspired by the piece of music of the same name by Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. The author has said that the book …
Cloud Atlas is the third novel by British author David Mitchell. Published in 2004, it won the British Book Awards Literary Fiction award and the Richard & Judy Book of the Year award. It was short-listed for the Booker Prize, Nebula Award for Best Novel, and Arthur C. Clarke Award, among other accolades. Unusually, it received awards from both the general literary community and the speculative fiction community. A film adaptation directed by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer, and featuring an ensemble cast, was released in 2012.
The book combines metafiction, historical fiction, contemporary fiction and science fiction, with interconnected nested stories that take the reader from the remote South Pacific in the 19th century to the island of Hawai'i in a distant post-apocalyptic future. Its title was inspired by the piece of music of the same name by Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. The author has said that the book is about reincarnation and the universality of human nature, and that the title references a changing landscape (a "cloud") over manifestations of fixed human nature (the "atlas"). It is not a direct reference to a cloud atlas.
I liked following the different stories and bouncing back and forth between them. I'm not totally sure what the thread that wove them all together was, but the individual stories kept me reading and the book as a whole was fun to read. Having seen the movie before reading the books, I had already formulated pictures of what all the characters looked like, which was probably helpful since there were many to keep track of.
