MITCHELL, David. The Bone Clocks. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2015.

8vo. Full deep blue-grey leather. Spine with four raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt decoration to covers and spine. All edges gilt. Brown satin endpapers. Sewn-in satin bookmark. 624 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the tipped-in signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published London: Sceptre; New York: Random House, 2014.

David Mitchell (b. 1969) has established himself across nine novels as one of the most ambitious and structurally inventive writers working in English. Cloud Atlas (2004) and number9dream (2001) were both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; The Bone Clocks, published in 2014, was longlisted and won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Stephen King, reviewing it on publication, named it one of the best novels of the year. It is the most ambitious of Mitchell's books in terms of its span, following a single protagonist from adolescence to old age across six decades while simultaneously conducting a metaphysical war in the margins of ordinary life.

Holly Sykes is sixteen years old in the summer of 1984, living in Gravesend on the Thames Estuary, when she runs away from home after a row with her mother and encounters a strange woman in a café who asks for "asylum" in exchange for a small kindness. Holly does not understand what the woman means. The novel follows her life from that summer — through her twenties in Switzerland and Africa, her thirties as a war correspondent in Iraq, her forties as a best-selling author — to old age on Ireland's Atlantic coast in the 2040s, by which point the oil supply has failed and civilisation is contracting around the edges. At each stage of her life, Holly's path intersects with a secret conflict she has never been able to see clearly: a centuries-old war between two groups of psychic beings, one of whom harvests the souls of others to achieve something approaching immortality, and the other of whom exists to stop them.

Mitchell uses the supernatural architecture not as fantasy decoration but as a structural mechanism — a way of examining mortality, time, and the question of what we leave behind us, from multiple angles and across multiple registers simultaneously. The novel is kaleidoscopic where Cloud Atlas was nested, moving between voices and tones with a freedom that only a writer of Mitchell's technical confidence could sustain across 624 pages. Fans were openly hoping it would finally catapult Mitchell to Booker Prize recognition; as has often been said, in any other year The Bone Clocks would have been a strong contender.

Near fine. Some very minor loss to cover gilt; otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000533