The Bone Clocks

Author: David Mitchell

David Mitchell's novels have always seemed very different, including a crime novel in contemporary Japan, a coming of age story in 1960s Britain, an historical novel set in 17th century Japan, and, of course, the intricate nested narratives of Cloud Atlas that takes us from a 19th century sailing ship to a distant future. But there are always links between them, characters reappear, images crop up again and again, and this new novel seems to hold the key. It's the story of Holly Sykes from her teenage years in the 1980s to her old age in a post-catastrophe Ireland in the middle years of this century. But along the way she becomes involved in an eternal war being fought between two different groups of immortals. From her first brush with the warring sides in the Kent countryside, through her marriage to a war reporter in Iraq, her time as a bestselling author, her part in the cataclysmic battle between the two sides, and the aftermath in Ireland as civilisation collapses, the novel keeps changing pace and tone so that we are always coming at things afresh. Why it's on the list: This is the closest we have come to Cloud Atlas, a series of different stories in different voices and from different points of view that are all linked by the recurring figure of Holly Sykes. The result is mesmerising.