Cloud Atlas (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: David Mitchell
- First Published: 2004
- Type of Work: Novel
- Time of Work: From the 1840's into the future
- Setting: New Zealand; Polynesia; London; Buenas Yerbas, California; Hawaii; and Korea
- Principal Characters: Adam Ewing, Robert Frobisher, Rufus Sixsmith, Luisa Rey, Timothy Cavendish, Sonmi-451, Zachry
- Genres: Long fiction
- Subjects: Twentieth century, Nineteenth century, Future, Twenty-first century, London, Publishing or publishers, Organized crime, Composers, Korea or Koreans, Hawaii, Poisons or poisoning, New Zealand or New Zealanders, Belgium or Belgian people, Clones or cloning
- Locales: California, London, England, Korea, Hawaii, New Zealand, Polynesia
David Mitchell's first novel Ghostwritten (2000) linked nine characters throughout the world and showed how chance meetings among them determined their fates. Mitchell's second work, Number9Dream (2001)—like Cloud Atlas, a finalist for the Man Booker prize—combined one man's confusion between reality and fantasy with primary-source and fiction-within-fiction elements, including excerpts from a diary and several short stories. Cloud Atlas similarly links several characters through letters, diary entries, interviews, and narrative prose in a puzzle...
[The entire page is 1939 words long]
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