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|title=Cloud Atlas

|author=David Mitchell

|buy=Maybe

|borrow=Yes

|pages=544

|publisher=Sceptre

|isbn=0340822783

}}

Covering six lives in vastly different times and places is daring, unique and refreshing as it moves away from the writer's obsession with structure, chapters and linearity. Instead Mitchell offers the reader a variety of writing styles as each of the six sections are told from different perspectives be it an unwitting American Adam Ewing, hero to a stowaway. This native is one of the last of his tribe following a genocide. There is also Somni-451, a fabricant/clone working with no rest in a futuristic Mc Donald's. Other sections of note include an opportunistic musician intent on fame and fortune at any cost and a young journalist determined to live up to the reputation of her father. Add to this an old bookseller who finds himself unwittingly in the unfamiliar surroundings of a Nursing Home and we have a wide array of characters.

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|name=Eileen Shaw

|verb= said

While I agree wholeheartedly with the general tenor of the review and admit that, like most novels it has its faults, I also think it has elements that are recognisable. It seems to me that every so often a writer comes along who finds a linear narrative too limiting for his oevre. He (and it is invariably a he) therefore reinvents the novel as a set of linked stories. Readers will remember Adam Thorpe's [[Ulverton by Adam Thorpe|Ulverton]], which has a similar fragmentary focus, with disparate stories set around a certain part of England, and Julian Barnes's book ''The History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters'', which also uses the device of linked stories with a variety of different characters with the focus on the nature of love in all its forms. I might also mention J M Coetzee’s ''Elizabeth Costello'' which takes the action into the spiritual world, mixing in lectures, philosophy and animal rights polemic, though the focus there is on what is missing from our lives. Coetzee, in common with Barnes and Thorpe refuses any easy answers to his quest.