Book

Cloud atlas : a novel / David Mitchell.

Mitchell, David (David Stephen),: (author.).

Summary:

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 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 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.

Record details

ISBN: 0375507256
ISBN: 9780375507250
ISBN: 9781417664726
ISBN: 141766472X
ISBN: 9781415613245
ISBN: 1415613249
ISBN: 9780812984415
ISBN: 0812984412
Physical Description: 509 pages ; 22 cm
Edition: 1st U.S. ed.
Publisher: New York : Random House Trade Paperbacks, ©2004.

Content descriptions

Formatted Contents Note:

The Pacific journal of Adam Ewing -- Letters from Zedelghem -- Half-lives : the first Luisa Rey Mystery -- The ghastly ordeal of Timothy Cavendish -- An orison of Sonmi~451.