By the New York Times bestselling author of Cloud Atlas | Longlisted for the Man Booker PrizeFollowing a terrible fight with her mother over her boyfriend, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her family and her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: A sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as “the radio people,” Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life.For Holly has caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics—and their enemies. But her lost weekend is merely the prelude to a shocking disappearance that leaves her family irrevocably scarred. This unsolved mystery will echo through every decade of Holly’s life, affecting all the people Holly loves—even the ones who are not yet born.
A Cambridge scholarship boy grooming himself for wealth and influence, a conflicted father who feels alive only while reporting on the war in Iraq, a middle-aged writer mourning his exile from the bestseller list—all have a part to play in this surreal, invisible war on the margins of our world. From the medieval Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a hotel in Shanghai to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future, their stories come together in moments of everyday grace and extraordinary wonder.
Rich with character and realms of possibility, The Bone Clocks is a kaleidoscopic novel that begs to be taken apart and put back together by a writer The Washington Post calls “the novelist who’s been showing us the future of fiction.”An elegant conjurer of interconnected tales, a genre-bending daredevil, and a master prose stylist, David Mitchell has become one of the leading literary voices of his generation. His hypnotic new novel, The Bone Clocks, crackles with invention and wit and sheer storytelling pleasure—it is fiction at its most spellbinding.
Praise for The Bone Clocks“Astonishing … No one, clearly, has ever told Mitchell that the novel is dead. He writes with a furious intensity and slapped-awake vitality, with a delight in language and all the rabbit holes of experience. … He’s brought together the time-capsule density of his eyes-wide-open adventure in traditional realism with the death-defying ambitions of Cloud Atlas. … Very few [writers] excite the reader about both the visceral world and the visionary one as Mitchell does.”*—The New York Times Book Review“A hell of a great read . . . wild, funny, terrifying . . . a slipstream masterpiece all its own … David Mitchell is a genre-bending, time-leaping, world-traveling, puzzle-making, literary magician, and The Bone Clocks* is one of his best books.”—Esquire “A fantastic, perilous journey over continents and decades. Fans of Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas will find this equally ambitious and mind-bending.”*—Marie Claire“Mitchell is back to try to shoot the moon again in a sweeping epic, The Bone Clocks, that, like Cloud Atlas, spans the ages and tinkers with the hidden gears of human history. It reads as if it were dreamed up whole and plotted out in a huge unlined notebook packed with drawings, charts, explosions of scribbles.”—GQ “A cautionary metaphysical thriller that grounds its ambition in its heroine’s human charm.”*—Vogue
From the Hardcover edition.
“She has four sons,” Nurse Purvis leads me on, “all with a London post code, but they never visit. You’d think old age was a criminal offense, not a destination we’re all heading to.”
