Cloud Atlas

A Novel

By: David Mitchell

Narrated by: Scott Brick, Cassandra Campbell, Kim Mai Guest, Kirby Heyborne, John Lee, Richard Matthews

Length: 19 hrs and 48 mins

Publisher's summary

By the New York Times best-selling author of The Bone Clocks

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

A postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in 21st-century fiction, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian love of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending, philosophical, and scientific speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction as profound as it is playful. In this groundbreaking novel, an influential favorite among a new generation of writers, Mitchell explores with daring artistry fundamental questions of reality and identity.

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 neo-capitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a post-apocalyptic 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.

As wild as a videogame, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult-classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.

List of readers:

• The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, read by Scott Brick
• Letters from Zedelghem, read by Richard Matthews
• Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery, read by Cassandra Campbell
• The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, read by John Lee
• An Orison of Sonmi-451, read by Kim Mai Guest
• Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After, read by Kirby Heyborne

This audiobook is available exclusively as an audio download!

Note to customers: The complicated format of this novel makes it seem that the audio may be cutting off before the end of a story, accompanied by a change in narrator. However, this is the author's intention, so please continue to listen, and the stories will conclude themselves as intended.

©2004 David Mitchell (P)2004 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

• 2005 Audie Award Nominee, Literary Fiction

"[Mitchell's] exuberant, Nabokovian delight in word play; his provocative grapplings with the great unknowables; and most of all his masterful storytelling: all coalesce to make Cloud Atlas an exciting, almost overwhelming masterpiece." ( Washington Times)

"[ Cloud Atlas] glows with a fizzy, dizzy energy, pregnant with possibility and whispering in your ear: listen closely to a story, any story, and you'll hear another story inside it, eager to meet the world." ( The Village Voice)

"A remarkable book....It knits together science fiction, political thriller, and historical pastiche with musical virtuosity and linguistic exuberance: there won't be a bigger, bolder novel next year." ( The Guardian)

Fascinating use of nested metaphors

The series of stories in this novel gripped me and kept me listening raptly until the very end.
I found the use of nested metaphors intriguing as it is something usually used in hypnotic methods.

A good idea but WAY too long.

If the characters would have been at all likeable then I might have enjoyed this VERY long book. If you have hours and hours to kill, then read the book and take notes so you know how everything ties together, otherwise read the Cliff Notes.

Different Enough from the Movie to Be Worth the Listen!

Which isn’t to say either is better or worse. I found I loved both, but there are always things lost in translation from book to movie, while movies benefit from refinement via hindsight.

It’s hard to say with any amount of accuracy since I DID see the movie before listening to the book, but I feel like the over arching connections are difficult to make out without the visual representations, so it might seem like a vaguely related anthology, but the stories are definitely interesting enough each on their own.

Great themes, touching moments, charming wit.

Very interesting stories

The narrators did a superb job with each story. How the author intertwines the stories in very subtle ways is amazing. Some of them were a bit long but I was amazed at each story and their meaning

A majestic tour de force….

…in which Mitchell the scholar and Mitchell the storyteller mix up six enthralling stories. And man, I can’t imagine a box Mitchell left unticked. I listened to some scenes over and over, sometimes to parse out their meaning but more often to hear the parts I missed while I was laughing. If you have this book and don’t feel like finishing it, at least treat yourself to the long, ceaselessly funny scene in which Timothy escapes from the nursing home called Aurora House. I can’t look back over the chapters until after I’ve submitted this review, but you’ll find that scene in the third book, the something ordeal of Timothy Cavendish. Hilarious does not begin to tell you. The readers, all six of them, are geniuses. I cried at the end. Like all the best and biggest books, it concluded at the tender place where human understanding meets the infinite unexplained. Mitchell believes that the arc of the universe “bends toward justice,” and shows this in the sweet, final chapters, where he breaks his most naïve character’s heart. It was an exhilarating listen from start to finish! Yes, buy it!

Like the book but glitches

Chapter 2 almost a minute from the end (I'll add more as I find them)

Astonishing virtuosity of form and substance

This book is not for an average reader. A lot of people would not get it. Those who do, will carry it with them as a magical torch. Brilliant architecture of form, an Egyptian Pyramid. Incomparable writer and a
Fantastic cast of readers. In one word, phenomenal.
(Do NOT watch the movie.)

A Puzzled & Perfect Novel

Ironic that I happen to read Cloud Atlas in the same year I read Calvino AND Gibbon's Decline and Fall. All I would have to do is read a little more Melville and perhaps some Jared Diamond and it would be impossible to explain as a mere coincidence. I loved the book. Maybe I'm a pushover for puzzle novels, structural creativity, narrative flourish, thematic clouds, etc., but I really enjoyed every page of Cloud Atlas. I do think this is a strong enough book that it deserves a place on the shelf next to DeLillo or Rushdie. Mitchell took a couple big risks and they paid off fairly well. Not that this is a perfect novel, and it is hard to justify giving it five stars when I also give Dostoevsky and Kafka five stars (certainly they deserve galaxies not stars). I guess the way I look at it is thus - if I read a novel and it makes me want to read another couple novels by the same author it deserves at least 4 stars. If, after reading an author's work, I want to go buy every damn work written - I'm pretty certain that justifies a five star rating

Over-hyped

I really wanted to like this book. The narrators did a great job, but the story itself is one tale following another - - through time - - highlighting how cruel and heartless mankind can be to each other. Filled with despicable characters, cheaters, liars, murderers, betrayers along with the simple naivete of those who have been damaged. The author is in love with his language and apparently has a low opinion of mankind in general. There are hints of inter-connects between the stories, but nothing clever or "ah ha" about it. I am truly baffled at the popularity of this novel. I may see the movie out of curiosity. They will have to cut quite of bit to make it fit into a single motion picture. This might make it better.

A masterpiece

Of all the novels I have read in the last year, this one stands out. The author has a remarkable ability to write in different voices. The book is six stories woven together -- starting in 1840, moving up through a post future iron age and then coming back down for the second halves of each of the first five stories. Each piece is written in an unique voice and each works. From a bisexual rake who is also a talented musician wheedling his way into the home of a famous European composer in the 1930s to a cynical, down and out publisher avoiding creditors and having madcap adventures in the present day, to a genetically modified "fabricant" living in the future, Mitchell pulls each voice off amazingly. With a mixture of humor, poinency, irony and extreme intelligence he weaves together the six stories, any of which could stand alone as a fully formed narrative. Brilliant. I loved it so much that I wanted to "read" another by him, and even read a real book, as none other was on audible. Have to say that "Number Nine Dream" cannot compare. This may have been Mitchell's best. I picked it orignially becuase it was a finalist (and the presumptive favorite) for the Booker prize, usually a reliable indicator. And indeed it was.