MITCHELL, David. Cloud Atlas. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2014.

Octavo. Full deep blue leather. Spine with four raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt design to covers. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 509 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press Signed Modern Classics series. Signed by the author on the special limitation page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2004.

David Mitchell (b. 1969) published his first novel, Ghostwritten, in 1999, and within five years had established himself as one of the most formally ambitious and intellectually restless writers working in English. Cloud Atlas, his third novel, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. It was the book that made him an international name, and in the two decades since its publication it has come to occupy a secure place in the emerging canon of early twenty-first-century fiction. Mitchell was named one of the hundred most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2007.

The novel is structured as six stories nested within each other like Russian dolls — or, more precisely, like a series of interrupted manuscripts, each found and read within the next. The first story begins in 1849, in the journals of a notary sailing the Pacific; the second consists of letters from a young composer's amanuensis in Bruges in the 1930s; the third is a 1970s thriller concerning a journalist and a nuclear cover-up in California; the fourth is a contemporary London comedy involving a publisher; the fifth is set in a futuristic corporate Korean state where human clones serve as branded labour; and the sixth unfolds in a post-apocalyptic Hawaiian archipelago where civilisation has collapsed and memory of the previous world has passed into legend. The first halves of stories one through five unfold in order; the sixth story is told complete; then stories five through one conclude in reverse sequence. The whole returns, at the end, to its beginning.

What Mitchell is exploring in this architecture is a set of questions about the relationship between past and future, between the violence and exploitation that run through history and the moments of connection, compassion, and resistance that persist alongside them. Each of the six stories finds its protagonist caught between complicity and conscience, between submission to power and refusal of it. The connections between the stories are partly explicit — each narrative is discovered and interrupted by the next — and partly thematic, running through the whole like a musical motif. The comparison to the polyphonic compositions that give the novel its title is sustained and deliberate: Mitchell structures his novel the way a composer structures a piece for multiple voices, each carrying the same material in a different register.

The 2012 film adaptation by Lana and Lilly Wachowski and Tom Tykwer, starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, and Jim Broadbent, brought the novel to a wider audience without diminishing the book's own reputation; the two works are different enough that neither displaces the other.

Very good. Some loss to cover gilt; very faint spotting to edge gilt. Contents otherwise fine.

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Catalogue Number: HH000518