Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas was published in 2004 and is the third novel by the British author David Mitchell. It combines metafiction, historical fiction, contemporary fiction and science fiction, with interconnected nested stories in different writing styles that move from the remote South Pacific in the nineteenth century to the island of Hawaii in a distant post-apocalyptic future.

Its title references a piece of music by Toshi Ichiyanagi, and the six narrators are linked across the book by discovering each other's accounts. The structure is the novel's defining feature: each story interrupts the one before it and is then resumed, so the reader learns the whole shape only in the second half. The stories run from a Pacific voyage in 1850 to a post-apocalyptic Hawaii, and the middle sections include a composer in Belgium between the wars and a journalist in California.

The book received awards from both the general literary community and the speculative fiction community, including the British Book Awards literary fiction award and the Richard and Judy Book of the Year award, and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Nebula Award. It was a New York Times bestseller.