The Bone Clocks

The Bone Clocks follows Holly Sykes from 1984 to 2043 in six sections told by five narrators. In the first, Holly is fifteen, from Gravesend, and running away from home after catching her boyfriend cheating on her. On the road she gives a strange old woman, Esther Little, what she asks for, "asylum," and lives through a night whose horrors she will not be allowed to remember. Then the book passes to other voices. In 1991 Hugo Lamb, a charming and amoral Cambridge student, meets Holly working at a bar in Switzerland and is recruited by the Anchorites, a secret order who keep themselves young by feeding on the souls of others. In 2004 the war correspondent Ed Brubeck, the father of Holly's daughter, Aoife, comes home for a family wedding, and after the wedding the child briefly goes missing. From 2015 to 2020 a fading novelist, Crispin Hershey, watches Holly's memoir, The Radio People, outsell him, frames a critic, Richard Cheeseman, with cocaine, and is finally shot dead.

In the fifth section, set in 2025, the fantastic story underneath comes to the surface. Marinus, a Horologist, one of a small band who are reborn naturally life after life, explains the long war between the Horologists and the Anchorites, and Holly joins an assault on the Anchorites' Chapel of the Blind Cathar. The last section, "Sheep's Head," finds Holly old, on a peninsula in Ireland in 2043, after climate collapse and the Endarkenment have wrecked Europe, caring for her granddaughter, Lorelei, and a young refugee, Rafiq. When a ship comes from Iceland, Holly makes sure the children leave on it and stays behind.

It is long, and uneven by design: each section has its own voice and its own kind of story, from a runaway's summer to a satire of literary London to a battle of immortals to a portrait of a failing world. The Crispin Hershey section is very funny. The Horologist section, heavy with explanation, is where many readers stall; James Smythe, who called the book "a spectacular novel" in Strange Horizons, felt it held "rather too much exposition." Readers of Cloud Atlas will recognize the method, and readers of Mitchell's earlier books will meet old faces.