Cloud Atlas (20th Anniversary Edition) - A Novel

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER NOW IN A DELUXE HARDCOVER EDITION The timeless, structure-bending classic that explores how actions of individual lives impact the past, present and future from a postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in fiction

Printed on exquisite deckle-edged paper, this edition features a stunning full-wrap jacket with luxurious soft-touch finish, a vivid neon-printed case, and full-color endpapers, as well as a new afterword by David Mitchell and a new introduction by Gabrielle Zevin, author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

One of the New York Times s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize

Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. The novel careens, with dazzling virtuosity, to Belgium in 1931 , to the West Coast in the 1970s, to an inglorious present-day 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 doesn t end even there. The novel boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, David 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 video game, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.

Rezension:

[David] Mitchell is, clearly, a genius. He 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. The New York Times Book Review

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. Dave Eggers

Wildly entertaining . . . a head rush, both action-packed and chillingly ruminative. People

The novel as series of nested dolls or Chinese boxes, a puzzle-book, and yet not just dazzling, amusing, or clever but heartbreaking and passionate, too. I ve never read anything quite like it, and I m grateful to have lived, for a while, in all its many worlds. Michael Chabon

Cloud Atlas ought to make [Mitchell] famous on both sides of the Atlantic as a writer whose fearlessness is matched by his talent. The Washington Post Book World

Thrilling . . . One of the biggest joys in Cloud Atlas is watching Mitchell sashay from genre to genre without a hitch in his dance step. Boston Sunday Globe

Grand and elaborate . . . [Mitchell] creates a world and language at once foreign and strange, yet strikingly familiar and intimate. Los Angeles Times