Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
9.0
Cloud Atlas is the award-winning third novel from British writer David Mitchell. The sprawling story features six separate—often unfinished and interrupted and perhaps linked—narratives that span from the nineteenth century to a distant, unrecognizable future, and provides an epic look at the nature of mankind.
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Critic's Reviews
Reviewer: Maile Meloy
"So brilliant. I didn't write for months after reading it. I was working on a novel and I just stopped. Why bother, because Mitchell's book seemed like everything I couldn't do....I should say, too, that the book isn't a cold display of cleverness: It has a heart, and a fierce intelligence and a single, recurring soul."
Reviewer: Hephzibah Anderson
"As with the most perplexing dreams and riddling rides, Cloud [Atlas] courteously sets us down where we began, but I surely won't be the only reader turning straight back to the first page and starting all over again."
Reviewer: A.S. Byatt
"David Mitchell entices his readers on to a rollercoaster, and at first they wonder if they want to get off. Then - at least in my case - they can't bear the journey to end....Cloud Atlas is powerful and elegant because of Mitchell's understanding of the way we respond to those fundamental and primitive stories we tell about good and evil, love and destruction, beginnings and ends."
Reviewer: Jeff Turrentine
"...the various pieces of David Mitchell's mysterious puzzle combine to form a haunting image that stays with the reader long after the book has been closed. Cloud Atlas ought to make him famous on both sides of the Atlantic as a writer whose fearlessness is matched by his talent."
Reviewer: Tom Barbash
"To read "Cloud Atlas" is to feel perpetually off balance, often disoriented, occasionally repulsed. But the rewards outweigh the struggle, and in the end, Mitchell offers his readers enormous and surprising satisfactions."
Reviewer: Laura Miller
"Nevertheless, what “Cloud Atlas” lacks in originality it makes up for in powerful, fluent storytelling....It is a fine entertainment masquerading as a work of art, and since fine entertainments are nearly as hard to come by, it would be unseemly to complain."
Reviewer: Tom Bissell
"So let it be said that 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. But ''Cloud Atlas'' is the sort of book that makes ambition seem slightly suspect."