Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Bone Clocks: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Bone Clocks: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Bone Clocks: A Novel
    Ebook776 pages12 hours

    The Bone Clocks: A Novel

    By David Mitchell

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The New York Times bestseller by the author of Cloud Atlas • Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize • Named One of the Top Ten Fiction Books of the Year by Time, Entertainment Weekly, and O: The Oprah Magazine • A New York Times Notable Book • An American Library Association Notable Book • Winner of the World Fantasy Award

    “With The Bone Clocks, [David] Mitchell rises to meet and match the legacy of Cloud Atlas.”—Los Angeles Times

    Following 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.

    Named to more than 20 year-end best of lists, including
    NPR • San Francisco Chronicle • The Atlantic • The Guardian • Slate • BuzzFeed

    “One of the most entertaining and thrilling novels I’ve read in a long time.”—Meg Wolitzer, NPR

    “[Mitchell] writes with a furious intensity and slapped-awake vitality, with a delight in language and all the rabbit holes of experience.”—The New York Times Book Review

    “Intensely compelling . . . fantastically witty . . . offers up a rich selection of domestic realism, gothic fantasy and apocalyptic speculation.”—The Washington Post

    “[A] time-traveling, culture-crossing, genre-bending marvel of a novel.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

    “Great fun . . . a tour de force . . . [Mitchell] channels his narrators with vivid expertise.”—San Francisco Chronicle
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateSep 2, 2014
    ISBN9780812994735
    Unavailable
    The Bone Clocks: A Novel

    Read more from David Mitchell

    Related to The Bone Clocks

    Related ebooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Man I Should Have Married

      Dec 29, 2019

      The Man I Should Have Married
      11 min read

    • Article

      The Last Waylon Party

      Jan 18, 2019

      The Last Waylon Party
      14 min read

    • Article

      ‘Cygnet’: Featured Fiction from Season Butler

      Jun 25, 2019

      A excerpt from Butler's debut coming-of-age novel, set in an appealingly rich world with quirky, flawed characters and a dramatic oceanfront landscape. The post ‘Cygnet’: Featured Fiction from Season Butler appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Duncan Hannah

      Sep 15, 2017

      Duncan Hannah
      25 min read

    • Article

      It Happened To Me…

      Jan 26, 2023

      It Happened To Me…
      7 min read

    • Article

      Getaway Driver

      Feb 10, 2022

      Getaway Driver
      11 min read

    • Article

      All Of Us Here

      Jun 4, 2020

      All Of Us Here
      6 min read

    • Article

      Caught Out

      Oct 2, 2022

      Caught Out
      9 min read

    • Article

      Ghost Girl, Banana

      Aug 21, 2023

      By the time I was 25, there were only two things I remembered about Mumma. The first was that she smelled of watermelons, the second was that we were happy. We’d taken our father’s name of course, but a name is only half a story. The other half exist

      6 min read

    • Article

      Summer Beach Reads

      Jan 10, 2021

      Summer Beach Reads
      7 min read

    • Article

      Little House

      Jun 5, 2023

      On Monday nights our mother made popcorn and served it to us in mugs with milk poured over. My younger sister and I carried our mugs into the family room and ate the popcorn with spoons, like cereal. We were five and seven. Until we were allowed to s

      21 min read

    • Article

      Speedboat

      Mar 24, 2022

      Nobody died that year. Nobody prospered. There were no births or marriages. Seventeen reverent satires were written – disrupting a cliché and, presumably, creating a genre. That was a dream, of course, but many of the most important things, I fi nd,

      14 min read

    • Article

      The Iron Lady

      Feb 22, 2024

      The Iron Lady
      2 min read

    • Article

      Stand-Up Gal

      Jan 15, 2024

      Stand-Up Gal
      4 min read

    • Article

      Life In The past Lane

      Aug 27, 2021

      Life In The past Lane
      5 min read

    • Article

      Beyond Rose Street

      Nov 10, 2021

      “Don’t tell anyone what happened to Tyler.” I stop running just long enough to turn, hoping for more instructions, but Leyton is already sprinting up his porch steps and through his front door. “Should we—” He slams the door behind him. Even from whe

      20 min read

    • Article

      Cricket League

      Sep 1, 2022

      First prize 10 and under Tang Li, age 9 Palmetto Bay, FL My name is Anisa. I was in Hawaii on vacation. I enjoyed sipping refreshing drinks, overlooking the turquoise ocean, and dancing with others, before I overheard that the priceless Fire Ring wa

      10 min read

    • Article

      Your Poetry

      May 28, 2021

      Email your poems to: (editorial@choicemag.co.uk) or post to Your Poetry, Choice, 4 Milnyard Square, Orton Southgate, Peterborough PE2 6GX There’s a train that runs on barren track, along the side & at the back,of the caravan. The children laugh & sho

      3 min read

    • Article

      Exodus

      Sep 15, 2018

      My exodus occurred after years wandering the wilderness of my hometown. For bread to live, for bread to leave, I worked a part-time gig at the Oregonian’s downtown insert facility, stacking pallet after pallet of inky-ass newspapers. The day in quest

      15 min read

    • Article

      A Puzzle Of Nostalgia

      Aug 26, 2022

      A Puzzle Of Nostalgia
      5 min read

    • Article

      Six Sonnets

      Jan 1, 2021

      Goldenrod, I could say, you know, everybody wants somethingfrom me, but, well, everybody wants something and nobody wantsnothing from me, goldenrod, towhead, beast. Goldenrod, you packthe meadows like gold-plated sardines. I have heart palpitationsbu

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Leather Coat

      Apr 4, 2024

      The Leather Coat
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Family Plot

      May 7, 2020

      The Family Plot
      10 min read

    • Article

      Now Is the Time

      Nov 24, 2020

      Now Is the Time
      5 min read

    Reviews for The Bone Clocks

    3.5/5

    69 ratings159 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      The Bone Clocks is told through the point of view of several characters during several periods of time, but their stories all come together to lead to the book's climax. Without spoiling the novel, I will say that the book is based on a unique idea about how the world works and where we all go when we die. Unfortunately, some section of the book are much better executed than others, or I would have given it a much higher rating.
    • 2/5
      I think I should have stopped reading after 100 pages, but I kept going because of the buzz about this book. Then with a little more than 120 pages to go I said screw it. I don't like books where you have to try to figure out who is speaking and there were parts to this book that seemed like they really didn't belong. Not that enjoyable.
    • 3/5
      That world wasn't made of stone, but sand.
      I'm afraid. One bad storm is all it will take.

      Likewise I fear that David Mitchell imagined his plot much more secure, a firm (albeit fickle)foundation across time and genre. He has made a name for such. Motifs and the pluck of personality transcend the centuries and continental divides in his deft hands.
      Unless they don't.
      Like here.
      The narrative arcs across the reader's imagination, a parabola of human frailty underscored with the uncanny. Yes, dear reader, Das Unheimliche. along with world building, Balzac at play at the fin du monde.

      Oh I wanted to love this. I was enchanted about how Magic Mountain featured early in the novel. I reflected on my wife and I reading Thomas Mann's masterpiece it in some baroque not-Woods translation, how we sat in a somewhat scary hotel bar in Memphis, how I pondered later that night calling Shelby Foote--he was in the phonebook.

      The novel proceeds from one Holly Sykes in the 1980s through a raconteur who finds Holly a few years later working in Switzerland. We shift gears and discover how the course was corrected. The supernatural now appears on every page and my interest began to wane.

      Suddenly there is a taunting portrait of an artist who may be an Amis. Not exactly Marty but the germ thereof. This section recall the Hull tangent in Cloud Atlas for better and worse. Which was fine until the next section which was YA urban fantasy, have you stumbled upon Freeforms's Shadowhunters, the TV series based on Cassandra Clare's series of novels The Mortal Instruments? If you said no, good for you. If you're familiar--then, yeah.

      I was ready to clear the deck, pitch the dreck, toss the book away and never reveal my thoughts. I love Mitchell, he brought my wife and I together. I bought this copy for her. Could I confess? What went wrong? Did his PC have formatting issues? Was his editor on mescaline?

      Then, the final section is a deft exploration of when the grid signs off with a crash. the EnDarkment. I loved this section and even the silver lining supernatural element in the closing pages couldn't sour my relief. This is likely a 2.4 book.
    • 5/5
      Tremendous. The reviews that suggested this was a return to Cloud Atlas-style Mitchell made me most nervous as that's my least favorite of his books that I've read. This starts off in Black Swan Green territory, dips back into the Jacob de Zoet narrative and then veers into bonkers literary Stephen King, sci-fi lunacy. I can't imagine how reading such a description would have encouraged me to read this, but I'm glad I did. As an overwound Bone Clock, I found this a delight.
    • 4/5
      Everything that happens has consequences in the future and one weekend for a 15-year old teenager after a fight with her mother has unexpected consequences throughout the rest of her life. The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell follows the life Holly Sykes through her own eyes and those four other characters during 60 years of her life.The book begins with a 15-year old Holly Sykes leaving home after a fight with her mother, only to have a life altering weekend for herself involving a trip to a paranormal world that she forgets and her family as her younger brother disappears. The book ends with a 74-year old Holly taking care of and wondering about the future of her granddaughter and foster son as climate change and resource depletion are sending the world towards a new dark age, though a surprising return of an old acquaintance results in them having a future. Between these two segments we follow the lives of an amoral political student Hugo Lamb, Holly’s husband Ed, author Crispin Hershey, and Marinus who is both a new and old acquaintance of Holly’s for a period of time in which they interact with Holly during different periods of her life that at first seem random but as the narrative progresses interconnect with one another in surprising ways including glimpses into a centuries long supernatural war in which Holly was directly involved in twice.From beginning to end, Mitchell created a page-turner in which the reader did not know what to expect. The blending of fiction and fantasy from the beginning then science fiction as the story went beyond 2014 (year of publication) as the narrative continued was expertly done. The use of first-person point-of-views were well done as was the surprise that the book wasn’t all through Holly’s point-of-view but switched with each of the six segments of the book giving the reader a mosaic view of Holly’s life. The introduction and slow filling in of the fantasy elements of the story were well done so when it really became the focus of the book in its fifth segment the reader was ready for it. On top of that the layers of worldbuilding throughout the book were amazing, as characters from one person’s point-of-view had random interactions with someone in another and so on. If there was one letdown it was the science fiction, nearly dystopian, elements of 2043 in which the political-economic setting seems farfetched—namely China who would be in trouble if there is an energy crisis and thus not dominate economically as portrayed in the book—that made the denouement land with a thud.I had no idea what to expect from The Bone Clocks and frankly David Mitchell impressed me a lot, save for the final 10% of the book. The blending of straight fiction, fantasy, and science fiction was amazing throughout the narrative and the numerous layers of worldbuilding, plot, and slowly evolving of the mostly unseen supernatural war that was instrumental to main points of the narrative. If a friend were to ask me about this book I would highly recommend it to them.
    • 5/5
      I adore this book. I care about the characters. I want to know more more more! Did not want this story to end...

      (midway) So far I love it, and don't want to put it down!
    • 3/5
      I think I would have enjoyed it more if two of the narrators hadn't been creepy guys being creepy. Otherwise it was an exciting tale of the life of a woman affected by a hidden supernatural war - set in the past, present, and future.
    • 4/5
      This was my first David Mitchell book and I really enjoyed it. I never knew where the story was going and while the book was big it was a quick read for me. I will definitely be going back and reading his previous books.
    • 5/5
      This was the second book of Mitchell’s that I’ve read. I picked it up very soon after Slade House and felt like I was getting a cup full of the same rather than the little teaspoon that Slade House had offered me. I really enjoyed it — it was full of all the strange creepiness that Slade House had but really wove a tale around characters and all their connections. I really enjoyed it and look forward to reading more from this author!
    • 3/5
      TL;DR: Mitchell struggles with pacing, and I found the book to be a wee bit too pretentious and smug for my tastes. Be ready to be confused for most of the book. Readers who are more forgiving than I am will like this book just fine, but there is only so much narrative obfuscation that I can take before I just abandon the book on the grounds of try-hard authoring. Admittedly, my expectations were through the roof going in because of how much I enjoyed Mitchell's previous book, Cloud Atlas. But it's hard to not be a little disappointed with how unevenly this book was written. David Mitchell can be a transcendental storyteller at his best and utterly pretentious at his worst, and unfortunately this book showcases both. "The Bone Clocks" has the bones of a wildly original fantasy novel- the world-building that went into creating the Anchorites and Horology is unique and spellbinding. Unfortunately, the pacing of this novel is uneven at best and seems to struggle with integrating the stylistic choices he made with the overarching plot of the novel. For most of the novel, it's a series of slice-of-life stories about people who interact with the main character, who is a victim of mysterious forces at work, in a strict third-person limited sort of narrative. But two-thirds of the way through, Mitchell decides to dump this narrative conceit and the plot spirals into a standard fantasy thriller. (Which isn't bad, but I found it to be jarring.)The main arc of the story concludes at page 548, and then we are subjected to almost 100 pages of epilogue (view spoiler) that doesn't seem at all connected to any of the plot and isn't foreshadowed at all in the rest of the book. It reads more as a separate short story/novella than anything else, and I am shocked this extraneous dongle got left in during the editing process.The tone of Mitchell's writing can also be a huge turn-off to the less patient reader. Mitchell can't help but insert a heaping dose of oh-aren't-I-clever in both the plot and his characters. The quintessential example of what I'm talking about is (view spoiler). Given a choice, Mitchell will always sacrifice an original idea for the opportunity to insert another oblique call back to a book he wrote that no one cares about.(GoodReads review, posted on February 4, 2017)
    • 5/5
      Again, several stories with a fantasy element set in the real world, with an overarching plot delivered over the space of a lifetime. I loved the character of Holly, and she held the story together.
    • 4/5
      Weird mix of a bit of fantasy with vignettes of a single person life from adolescence to old age, starting in the recent past all the way to a near term future. Each portion is well written, but it takes a long time before the whole thing makes sense when we finally learn what is really going on.
    • 3/5
      I gave up after 400 pages. Just cannot take in any more information, new characters, new places, new descriptions. I am overdosed. You cannot expect a reader to work his way through five (well-written, I admit, but dense) unfinished novels each of which over 100 pages, only to bring all of them to a conclusion in the last 100 pages. I always distrust novels with over 400 pages and this one, unfortunately, is a confirmation. As Ursula LeGuin writes in her Guardian review, the author leaves the reader in too much doubt whether this is worthwhile the effort of reading. Such a pity as I admire Cloud Atlas very much.
    • 4/5
      Not as enjoyable as Cloud Atlas, despite a similar structure. might go back and re-read when I have big chunks of reading time available, because ther was so much more in this book than I had time for.
    • 3/5
      I really wanted to like this book. I heard about it on NPR, and the supernatural elements seemed interesting, and I thought that would be a larger part of the story, at least in the background. It took more than 2/3 of the book to even *get* to that part, and it was not what I expected, or anything like I had hoped, it was frightfully disappointing. But *that* part would have been ok, other parts of the story were interesting, and could have gone somewhere. I don't want to spoil it for those who want to read it, so I won't, however, overall, I liked it, but I felt large portions could have been cut out for this type of story, and the ending could have been better. About 250 pages too long, and a lot of them are from the middle.
    • 4/5
      Is there a genre this book doesn't cover?! Mind bending!
    • 3/5
      Mitchell must have thought he was so clever and funny when half way through his multilayered novel he had a writer-character complain about a critique that panned his book for gracelessly combining shallow zeitgeist commentary with sudden fantasy elements. And of course, it then turns out that this is exactly what Mitchell's own book is.

      It's not so much that the very concept of a novel consisting of 80% solid drama and 20% garble-filled woo-woo fantasy is off the table; if you can pull it off, go nuts. But Mitchell can't. The 20% fantasy stuff is truly, honestly terrible, and it not only ruins the book's overall effect, but it sells out some of the genuinely sweet and thrilling stuff that surrounds it by making it mythology fodder. Baffling.
    • 2/5
      I had hoped to enjoy this book a lot more than I did. The concept seemed cool, but the whole thing was overambitious and wound up seriously underdeveloped. The characters are not all strictly human, and some have very complicated backstories, but there are so many of them, in such a short span of pages, that none of them are fleshed out characters. They come across as interchangeable cardboard people whose names and situations are fairly easy to get mixed up. The magic bits, which should have been the cool fantasy concept that makes this book compelling, are not well described, ever, and most of the supernatural stuff is so nearly unmentioned for the first 400 pages that the book comes across as a dull bit of literary fiction with a few fantasy elements thrown in at the last minute near the end. When the fantasy stuff comes more into focus, it feels out of place. The main character, Holly, somehow follows along when the magic dudes explain what is going on, and accepts everything almost immediately, which seems a bit out of character and unlikely. I had a hard time working out what the heck was going on once the magic stuff started, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the characters' attempt at explaining it. The concept was cool and some of the scenes were great, but as a novel this one was not that great.
    • 5/5
      Another great story by David Mitchell. Spinning one scary possibility after another. And what a dim future, all too real.
    • 4/5
      Once again David Mitchell has produced a wonderful array of characters, with complete life stories, vocabularies and ways of thinking. While I'm not entirely sure that the genre mix of straight novel, fantasy and dystopia works as they morph from one to the next and back again, I really enjoyed the characters and Mitchell's writing. His gentle introduction of each major character in the first person, so it takes a while to know who they are, is so well done. I also enjoyed the in-joke of having characters from other books in this book. His vision of the future is very plausible. The only reason I haven't given it another star is that the fantasy denouement required too great a leap of faith for me.
    • 4/5
      I was left with mixed feelings about this one. Holly's story is compelling and well written. There's a great feeling of mystery and suspense and lots of memorable characters. However, when all the mystery is finally explained, it stopped being enjoyable and started to resemble an action-movie climax for me. The future dystopia we are offered later in the book no doubt serves as a warning for us all, but it kind of kills the wonder and enigma created in the first few chapters. The story is peppered with wit and humour, especially about the life of a writer. A disagreement between the (fictional) writer and his reviewer ends badly, so maybe I should heed the warning and stop here.
    • 3/5
      I've avoided David Mitchell's novels until now because their mix of realism and mysticism wasn't my sort of thing. However, I decided to give this one a go mainly because I was quite taken by the opening. Now that I've finished it, on balance I think I was right - his novels are not for me, especially a 600 page one. Having said that, there were sections of this novel that I enjoyed and were beautifully written - Holly Sykes' teenage rebellion, the sections set during the Iraq war, the section where parents search frantically for a missing child, the satirical episode involving pretentious writers and literary festivals and even the ending set in a distopian future. But I found the mystical sections where the Atemporals do battle with the Anchorites a complete turnoff and was close to abandoning the novel at this point. The battle between these forces came across like something from a very boring computer game and I got completely lost, and bored by, the welter of magical powers that these incorporeal characters were able to summon up.
      For me, these sections added nothing, in fact spoiled, what could have been a powerful story about one woman's life struggle through past, present and into a horrific future.
    • 3/5
      Another quite entertaining novel from David Mitchell in the time machine fiction vein, although I think the plot doesn't jump in time. Starts out like Cloud Atlas or Ghostwriter, but ends up like an episode of X-men. A nice example of the difficulty one has in maintaining quality when all details are revealed and nothing is left to the imagination.
    • 4/5
      Vegetarians versus carnivores! Mostly very enjoyable. Could have been a bit shorter, I felt. Not a great fan of fantasy and at times felt it was a bit like an old Dennis Wheatley horror story. However, the quality of the writing makes it very readable. I liked the way the history was recounted from various people's perspectives, especially Crispin Hershey. Not so keen on the made-up tech-terminology of the future.
    • 4/5
      David Mitchell isn't afraid to try new things in his writing. In Cloud Atlas, he used a kind of pyramid structure, moving from distinct stories and characters. He plays with structure again in The Bone Clocks, skipping across time and changing narrators. As we read, we wonder how it all ties together. Mitchell does tie everything together, and at the end, the message is clear: time passes, life ends, and we have to do the best we can with the life we have.However, what distinguished the book for me were the characters: Holly Sykes, Crispin Hersey, Hugo Lamb. Love them or hate them, they were vivid and complex, and I was sorry to reach the end of their stories.
    • 4/5
      Although not quite as good as [Cloud Atlas] (which I loved!), this one is still worth the read. Each chapter focuses on a different character, a runaway girl, a college-aged boy, a war correspondent, and a writer, all loosely tied together by Holly and a weird psychic phenomenon, some more, some less. The characters have such genuine voices, so unique from the others, that I was pulled into their stories. I didn't like all of them, but they were real. And I was eager to see if and how their stories and experiences would come together. (Warning to the reader -- be patient!!) One of the sections has a very serious look at what we as humans are doing to our earth, sobering. Have fun with this one!Some favorite quotes (not spoilers): "I loved X like he was a part of me, and he loved me like a stick of gum. He'd spat me out when the flavor went, unwrapped another, and stuffed it in..." p. 16"Being born is a hell of a lottery." p. 56"Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it, many of the sane crave it, but the wise worry about its longterm side effects. Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul. Power's comings and goings, from host to host, via war, marriage, ballot box, diktat, and accident of birth are the plot of history." p.100
    • 5/5
      David Mitchell's latest novel is a force of nature. Reading The Bone Clocks felt like unraveling a puzzle overseen by some omnipresent, all-seeing Oz. Or maybe a more apt description is holding a nautilus in your hand, noting its whorls that make up the whole breathing creature that is the universe of the book. It just keeps growing on you... Read and relish this book slowly. Don't speed read. Linger. I'm a fast reader, but I took my sweet time with this one. There are multitudes and tonalities here that emerge like time lapse photography of something growing, expanding.Mitchell is best known as a master prose stylist known for his genre-bending writing. With The Bone Clocks, he doesn't pull off the literary triple axle so much as a gruelingly satisfying relay race, where several characters take over narration at junctures to carry the story forward. Cloud Atlas, which everyone seems to want to compare The Bone Clocks to, is much more acrobatic, bending not only in place and time but literary narrative styles, each chapter its own standalone novella. In contrast, The Bone Clocks feels more grounded, coherent, like a conventional book, even with its jagged mix of realism and fantasy. In many ways, The Bone Clocks felt like a more fluid, mature Cloud Atlas; just as Cloud Atlas was a more fluid and mature Ghostwritten. The say that ambitious writers write the same novel over and over again to improve it with each new book. Mitchell has done that and more with The Bone Clocks.The Bone Clocks is similar to Cloud Atlas in its six-part structure that plays the scales from naive past to dark, uncertain future, but events are distilled within the lifetime of one character, Holly Sykes. Unlike Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks has a clear protagonist in Holly, though she isn't always our narrator. In the beginning of the book, we meet Holly as a hard-headed teenager living in Kent in Thatcher-era 1980s and by the end of the book, as a fiercely protective grandmother living in Ireland in an apocalyptic 2040s. During most of her life, though, we only get glimpses of her through the first-person eyes of other characters—four others in total. This may seem jarring but it actually works movingly because we discover and get to know Holly from all these different tangents, seeing and experiencing her life without being inside her head. This gives the storytelling a cinematic quality because you are watching Holly through her impact and influence on others. Distance and intimacy.Expect a lot of globe-trotting. Across the span of 600-plus pages, Mitchell takes you to towns and cities like Gravesend, New York City, the Hudson Valley, Toronto, Vancouver, Shanghai, Cartagena, as well as grabs your hand and darts across Iceland, Switzerland, Russia, Australia, and Iraq. Along with a strong sense of place (Mitchell could be a travel writer, seriously), there is a strong sense of time as well. Past, present, and future are represented here both in the propulsive, forward-moving main narrative and in the memories and recollections of various characters.And that's just the human world of temporality. Because, of course, Mitchell doesn't just create worlds, he creates a whole other universe in the creation of two groups of immortals or Atemporals: the Horologists and Anchorites. The Horologists are immortal by default. They live out their lives like mortals, die, and then return forty-nine days in a body whose soul has departed, usually a child, and usually a child with exceptional psychic sensitivities. The Anchorites, on the other hand, are immortal through a kind of soul-eating cannibalism that recalls the recent book Doctor Sleep by Stephen King and the horror-stylings of Clive Barker. These baddies hunt down these special children and "decant" their souls. Mortals are their quarry; good ole Horologists try to stop them. It is a very black-and-white, good-versus-evil kind of conflict, not very nuanced. When we first get to know the surly teenaged Holly, a First Mission by the Horologists has failed tragically; they are scattered and broken. Later when we see middle-aged Holly, the Horologists try for a Second Mission that leads to a spectacular, climatic siege that made me think of Harry Potter fight scenes. This war plays out in the background, with occasional terrifying forays into reality in the early half of the book, though by the middle and latter half becomes thoroughly embroiled and entwined in our/Holly's world (and her head). More than any idea that comes across in the book are the ideas of ties and kinship. Everything is connected ... is something that permeates all of Mitchell's books. His books may feel vast and humanity small in them but at the heart of his writing—and The Bone Clocks is no exception—people matter. What we experience and decide to do matters. We see this most earnestly in Cloud Atlas where acts of cruelty and kindness have consequences that ripple across time and space. Above the din of the action and plotting, The Bone Clocks is very much a book about action being set into motion by small acts, often unseen and unheard, or sometimes quickly "redacted" from conscious memory, as happens a lot in The Bone Clocks. This gives the book a kind of fairy-tale quality in a way. Consider the fateful early scene where Holly meets an old woman and makes her a promise in exchange for a drink of tea. Or, when a character in his love-smitten state, remarks: "Experimentally, silently, I mouth I love you ... No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same." If I explain more about this line it would be egregiously spoiling but know that this undeclared devotion will matter critically later. Then, toward the climax of the book, a labyrinth that we first heard about obliquely in the first few pages makes a big splash.It all ties beautifully together.The Bone Clocks treads this same thematic path of kinship both within the novel but also across all the previous books as well. What many fans will surely find thrilling is that Mitchell creates connections, linking to characters in his previous novels, most notably Black Swan Green, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Number9 Dream, and Cloud Atlas. There is an actual word for this, unsurprisingly: metalepsis, the "paradoxical transgression of the boundaries between narrative levels or logically distinct worlds." If anyone transgresses with panache, it's certainly Mitchell in The Bone Clocks. As we've seen before, he regularly imports and exports his own props and characters from earlier works, blurring the boundaries of each novel as a self-contained narrative. It is recurrence but not duplication, though, since Mitchell makes his references through ancestry, reincarnation, or a retelling of a character. By the end of The Bone Clocks, the fantasy action has shifted to a more speculative, dystopian bent. While we've moved on from the Atemporal war, Holly is faced with a much more real, tangible threat. It is a disturbing chapter to end with and yet there is a glimmer of hope, as an old friend of Holly makes an appearance to repay a kind act, just as Holly once did. Actions and reactions. The writing itself is Michell-esque. Per usual, if you've read his other novels, Mitchell gives us observational vertigo that offers the smell of London streets, the heat of the Baghdad sun, or even the movements of shadow and light as precious, unforgettable fragments. You will be highlighting or underlining like crazy in The Bone Clocks.There are a few snooty critics from The New Yorker and elsewhere who have blasted The Bone Clocks as a fantasy hack. My inner thug/ardent Mitchell groupie wants to treat those book reviewers to the same fate as Felix Finch in Cloud Atlas or Richard Cheeseman in The Bone Clocks, but the naysayers do have their points ("intricate replications ... but what do they amount to") and they at least acknowledge that Mitchell is a phenomenal storyteller and novelist. I just don't think they really get Mitchell. So yeah he's given us a literary book about an inter-dimensional war between incorporeal shape-shifters who can ingress and egress through our minds and fight each other with incantations fueled by psychovoltage. Um, who can do that? Who can get the hearts of both genre fans and literary fans a-beating? My final grumble: The Bone Clocks should have made the Booker Prize shortlist.(I'm a huge fan of Mitchell's work. If you are, too, and want a full bibliography, check out Everything You Could Possibly Want to Know About David Mitchell, which has interviews, reviews, essays, and a lot more.)
    • 4/5
      I adore David Mitchell's work, even if I never quite know what to make of him.

      In one corner of my duelling mind lies the knowledge that this is my least favourite of his works thus far, although this is primarily an indicator of how much I adored Ghostwritten, Black Swan Green and Cloud Atlas, not to mention the sublime and subtle vintage of Thousand Autumns. Perhaps it's the constant monologues, always so dense regardless of which character is speaking them, reminding me more of Bernard Shaw than of the 21st century. Or the tantalising final chapter, that could have made an entire book on its own, which suggests that a more fascinating and human story lurks in the fringes of what is written here.

      Yet, in the other corner, wearing a tattered and post-apocalyptic outfit, is my realisation that I was captivated by this book. I found myself staying up late, smiling like a loon as I determined to get through just five more pages. Mitchell stuffs his narrative with so many clever true-life touches, haunting images, and palpable subplots, that one is never bored. The Bone Clocks is the kind of novel that can easily be revisited for endless tchotchkes lining the literary walls. The characters herein - many of whom, or their ancestors, can be found in the pages of Mitchell's other works if one looks hard enough - are rarely straightforward, with most of the villains complicated and all of the heroes laced with vices.

      Although Mitchell has always flirted with the otherworldly, he seems to be a rationalist at heart, so I was surprised to realise how much this novel relied upon the fantastic. Yet, are generic boundaries merely a way for booksellers to organise their wares? Are not Orlando, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Lathe of Heaven, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Nights at the Circus some of my other favourite novels, as they merge literary fiction with supreme gifts of imagination? So, yes. It took me the entire book to make up my mind, but I'm quite delighted with this. If pressed, I'd acknowledge that the extra burden placed on Mitchell's imagination to create the worlds of the novel may have resulted in not enough time spent on the oft-repetitive dialogue, but that's a minor point. Onward to Slade House!
    • 4/5
      This is a romp through time and place, a speculative work that begins in 1984 and ends in a 2054 that may be speculative but also strikes this reader as terrifyingly feasible. The notion that there are immortal souls who inhabit bodies just as their original owner is giving up the ghost (so to speak) -- and that there is a group of evil doers who have figured out how to mimic this immortality but only by committing murder -- provides a complex and delightful platform for exploring themes no smaller than love, death, power, mortality (duh), and the struggle between good and evil. Mitchell's characters are wonderfully multidimensional and his careful unraveling of the labyrinthine story of the Horologists and Anchorites is perfectly paced. Mitchell simply tells a good story and this rich novel is full of stories. Definitely a worthwhile commitment of precious reading time.
    • 4/5
      4.5 stars

      Wow.

      Reading this book was a JOURNEY. 624 pages, six separate sections, five different perspectives, and a whole lotta feelings. This book was existential, political, profound, engaging, emotional. Make sure your emotional reserves are full before you start reading because this book is emotionally exhausting . You know that feeling when you've just watched a brilliant, life-changing movie in the theatre, only to come out and find that mundane, day-to-day life is as is, completely oblivious to your epiphanies? The Bone Clocks is the book equivalent of that.

      Imagine watching someone's life unfurl before your eyes, from 1984 when they are 15 years old, to 2043, when they are 74 years old. Now add onto that the fact that you're seeing said person's life unfurl indirectly through five other people, all of whom have backstories and lives of their own. Now add some sci-fi/fantasy elements into the mix. Then, to finish it all off, add a lot of locations, including cities and towns in England, Ireland, Iceland, China, Switzerland, Colombia, Australia, and Baghdad, just to name a few. A hint of history here, a hint of politics there, and, there you have it, The Bone Clocks in all its glory.

      Some things about The Bone Clocks :
      1) You'd think that having five different perspectives (and six total sections) across various time periods in a novel would be a bit overkill, but surprisingly, David Mitchell pulls it off flawlessly. Every perspective I read was immensely engaging, I was honestly never bored. You get so attached to one character, only to be jolted into another character's perspective. So, you decide that, naturally, this new perspective can't be as enjoyable as the one preceding it - but it is, and you find yourself immersed in another compelling character's story. Even after you're finished with their perspectives, you're not left completely in the dark when it comes to these characters' fates. Through Holly, you get little hints about their whereabouts, present and past. Sometimes the hints were nice cherries on top, and sometimes they casually and briskly blew your soul to smithereens (ED, AND AOIFE).
      2) This book is definitely slow-paced, and I didn't mind that one bit. The steady buildup of the plot is so worth it in the end when everything finally starts to come together and make sense.
      3) This book kind of reminded me of The Time Traveller's Wife in the sense that it's a very human story with some not-so-human elements weaved throughout it. The fantasy/sci-fi elements don't make the story any less grounded, this story is a human story, through and through. If anything, the fantasy elements emphasize the story's human elements all the more, some of which were comforting in their normalcy, and some of which were frighteningly plausible.
      4) The writing style is fantastic, albeit a little hard to get through sometimes because it's so elevated. Be prepared for a lot of British slang and allusions. Thank God for Google. But despite all of that, I say just try to power through the hard bits because when David Mitchell's writing is good, it's really really good. Here's one of my favourite quotes:

      ?Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it, many of the sane crave it, but the wise worry about its long-term side effects. Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul. Power?s comings and goings, from host to host, via war, marriage, ballot box, diktat, and accident of birth, are the plot of history. The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral. Power will notice you. Power is watching you now. Carry on as you are, and power will favor you. But power will also laugh at you, mercilessly, as you lie dying in a private clinic, a few fleeting decades from now. Power mocks all its illustrious favorites as they lie dying. ?Imperious Caesar, dead and turn?d to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away.?

      5) This book is SO diverse. In ethnicity, in geography, in cultures, in history.
      6) Now that I understand what it means, I LOVE THE TITLE. Such a well-put metaphor.
      7) That last section was kind of terrifying. Mitchell does not shy away from hard truths.
      8) The ending was so bittersweet and saddening and nostalgic.
      9) What ever happened to Soleil Moore? And Ed? And Hugo? I need to know dammit. Hugo was totally showing a sliver of humanity. TOO MANY QUESTIONS, NOT ENOUGH ANSWERS.

      As for the reason why I gave this 4.5 stars instead of 5, I can't really pinpoint one. It just didn't have that extra umph that so many of my favourite books have. I loved the characters, I felt for them immensely, I appreciated the book's profound messages, but still, I didn't feel like this book fully drew me in.

      That's all I have to say about this book, for now. I think it's safe to say that I've never read anything like The Bone Clocks before, and probably never will.