Cloud Atlas

Six narratives nest inside one another like a set of Russian dolls, each interrupted mid sentence by the next and resumed, in reverse order, once the innermost story finishes. An 1850s Pacific journal follows an American lawyer, Adam Ewing, who is being slowly poisoned by a doctor on his voyage home until an escaped slave named Autua saves his life. A 1930s sequence of letters from a disgraced young composer, Robert Frobisher, working as an amanuensis to an older master in Belgium, describes him discovering and reading Ewing's journal while composing his own great, doomed work, the Cloud Atlas Sextet. A 1970s conspiracy thriller follows journalist Luisa Rey investigating a nuclear plant coverup with the help of an elderly Sixsmith, who has kept Frobisher's letters for decades. A present day comic strand follows a vanity publisher, Timothy Cavendish, tricked into a nursing home he has to engineer an escape from, reading a manuscript of Luisa Rey's story along the way. A dystopian future in a corporate controlled Korea follows a cloned fast food worker named Sonmi 451 who gains consciousness, joins a resistance, and is executed for authoring a manifesto that is treated, centuries later, as scripture. And, at the book's center, a post apocalyptic Hawaii follows a tribesman named Zachry helping a technologically advanced visitor named Meronym reach a mountaintop transmitter, where Sonmi's recorded testimony survives as a kind of holy relic. Each character shares a comet shaped birthmark, Mitchell's device for suggesting the same soul recurring across centuries of predation and, occasionally, resistance to it.

Mitchell gives each nested story its own genre and voice entirely, from ships log to epistolary novel to airport thriller to invented future pidgin, and the book reads as a genuine structural puzzle that some readers find thrilling to assemble and others find more clever than moving by its final pages.