David Mitchell is an award-winning British writer who has been hailed as one of the most imaginative and dexterous novelists of our time.  

After reading Mitchell's “Cloud Atlas,” accomplished writer Maile Meloy claimed she put down her pen and stopped writing for months.

“Cloud Atlas” is a literary Stradivarius, if you will, but one that isn’t just a virtuoso work. As Meloy said, it has “a heart and fierce intelligence.”  It is also a groundbreaking approach to the novel.  

When you pick it up, set aside your traditional linear vocabulary of the novel and settle in for a “good read.”  It is a challenging innovation of the genre, but one very well worth the effort.

“Cloud Atlas” unfolds in layers, each in a different time and place, something like a Russian Babushka Doll. Each chapter opens onto another, but different story, linked by elements that carry over from one chapter to the next.  

It can be disorienting and puzzling; in fact, it is a kind of puzzle that had me turning back to previous chapters to find clues that would help me with my understanding of how they are linked.  

And the stories are connected: each one appears as a sort of historical parable in the next. There is a sense that characters are reincarnations from one to the next chapter.  And not only do the chapters move from one time and place to the next, but they are cut off until we reach the center of the novel. At that point, it reverses in time, ending with the conclusion of each story in reverse order.  

Confused yet?  Don’t be; this is a work of genius that deserves a wide readership, and rewards the effort.

The work covers nearly 1,000 years, beginning on a ship sailing around New Zealand in the mid-19th century, moving to Belgium in the 1930s, then California in the 1970s, on to England in the present, then Korea in the (perhaps) late 21st century, and finally, Hawaii in a dystopian time after “the Fall.”  

The narratives open up a meditation on humanity’s connections; on history and its movement (are we scaling upward as a species, or spiraling downward?); and on the power of belief to make and remake the world.  

Made into a movie in 2012, “Cloud Atlas” won the British Book Awards Literary Fiction Award and the Richard & Judy Book of the Year award, and was short-listed for the 2004 Booker Prize, Nebula Award, Arthur C. Clarke Award, among others.