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Cloud Atlas

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A timeless, structure-bending classic that explores how actions of individual lives impact the past, present and future—from a postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in fiction
Featuring a new afterword by David Mitchell and a new introduction by Gabrielle Zevin, author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize
Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. The novel careens, with dazzling virtuosity, to Belgium in 1931, to the West Coast in the 1970s, to an inglorious present-day England, to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok, and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history.
But the story doesn’t end even there. The novel boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, David Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.
As wild as a video game, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.
List of Readers:
The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, read by Scott Brick
Letters From Zedelghem, read by Richard Matthews
Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery, read by Cassandra Campbell
The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, read by John Lee
An Orison of Sonmi~451, read by Kim Mai Guest
Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After, read by Kirby Heyborne
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  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      The foppish English composer living abroad in the '30s, the vanity publisher imprisoned in a Scottish nursing home, the flinty female journalist exposing corporate malfeasance--these are three story lines from the six tales Mitchell weaves together in a sequence of literary forms (journal, letters, testament, first-person narrative). Each performer reads a section, but the packaging gives no clue as to who does what. The tales are tenuously connected, and each but the last futuristic episode is interrupted, only to be continued later in reverse order. Confusing? Yes, but the narration is uniformly excellent, and somehow it all hangs together. There's no going back; individual episodes are unidentified on the discs. The publisher gets kudos for bringing this fine, puzzling, and original novel to the audio format. J.B.G. 2006 Audie Award Finalist (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 28, 2004
      At once audacious, dazzling, pretentious and infuriating, Mitchell's third novel weaves history, science, suspense, humor and pathos through six separate but loosely related narratives. Like Mitchell's previous works, Ghostwritten
      and number9dream
      (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize), this latest foray relies on a kaleidoscopic plot structure that showcases the author's stylistic virtuosity. Each of the narratives is set in a different time and place, each is written in a different prose style, each is broken off mid-action and brought to conclusion in the second half of the book. Among the volume's most engaging story lines is a witty 1930s-era chronicle, via letters, of a young musician's effort to become an amanuensis for a renowned, blind composer and a hilarious account of a modern-day vanity publisher who is institutionalized by a stroke and plans a madcap escape in order to return to his literary empire (such as it is). Mitchell's ability to throw his voice may remind some readers of David Foster Wallace, though the intermittent hollowness of his ventriloquism frustrates. Still, readers who enjoy the "novel as puzzle" will find much to savor in this original and occasionally very entertaining work. Agent, Douglas Stewart.
      (Aug. 24)

      Forecast:
      Lots of buzz and a friendly paperback price will ensure strong sales, but like other fashionable tomes (think Pynchon's
      Mason & Dixon) Mitchell's novel may be more admired than read.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

Languages

  • English

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