Cloud Atlas
From David Mitchell, the Booker Prize nominee, award-winning writer and one of the featured authors in Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists 2003” issue, comes his highly anticipated third novel, a work of mind-bending imagination and scope. A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; an ambitious journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing the mendicant and violent family of his star author; 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 captivating third novel, David Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation on humanity’ s dangerous will to power, and where it may lead us
Where Cloud Atlas keeps showing up
Four of our editors' lists feature this novel.
Books in conversation with Cloud Atlas
A few of the closest reads from our full list.
What you might want to know about Cloud Atlas
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Six interrupted stories nest inside each other across centuries: a Pacific journal, a Belgian composer, a 1970s San Francisco journalist, a present-day British editor, a cloned Korean server, and a post-collapse islander.
Yes. Cloud Atlas uses six nested narratives in different styles, including 19th-century travel journal, 1970s thriller, future dystopia, and a far-future post-apocalyptic dialect. The structure rewards patience but demands it.
Yes. The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer co-directed a 2012 film adaptation starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, and a large ensemble cast in multiple roles. The film is faithful in spirit but reorders and intercuts the stories.
Cloud Atlas was written by David Mitchell, published in 2004 by Modern Library.
Cloud Atlas is 537 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Cloud Atlas takes most readers 8 to 12 hours to finish.
Cloud Atlas is a standalone novel by David Mitchell, not part of a series.
Cloud Atlas is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
