About the Author

David Mitchell is the author of the novels Ghostwritten, Number9Dream, Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, The Bone Clocks, Slade House, and Utopia Avenue. He has been shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize and has won the John Llewellyn Rhys, Geoffrey Faber Memorial, and South Bank Show literature prizes, as well as the World Fantasy Award. In 2018, he received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, given in recognition of a writer’s entire body of work. In addition, David Mitchell together with KA Yoshida has translated from the Japanese two books by Naoki Higashida: The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism and Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A Young Man’s Voice from the Silence of Autism. Born in 1969, Mitchell grew up in Worcestershire and, after graduating from university, spent several years teaching English in Japan. He now lives in Ireland with his wife and their two children.

Reviews

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER
FINALIST FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
A Times (UK) Best Book of the Decade
A New York Times Notable Book
A Globe and Mail 100 Best Book
Longlisted for the IMPAC Award

“[David] Mitchell is, clearly, a genius. He writes as though at the helm of some perpetual dream machine, can evidently do anything, and his ambition is written in magma across this novel’s every page.”—The New York Times Book Review

“One of those how-the-holy-hell-did-he-do-it? modern classics that no doubt is—and should be—read by any student of contemporary literature.”—Dave Eggers

“Wildly entertaining . . . a head rush, both action-packed and chillingly ruminative.”—People

“The novel as series of nested dolls or Chinese boxes, a puzzle-book, and yet—not just dazzling, amusing, or clever but heartbreaking and passionate, too. I’ve never read anything quite like it, and I’m grateful to have lived, for a while, in all its many worlds.”—Michael Chabon

“Cloud Atlas ought to make [Mitchell] famous on both sides of the Atlantic as a writer whose fearlessness is matched by his talent.”—The Washington Post Book World

“Thrilling . . . One of the biggest joys in Cloud Atlas is watching Mitchell sashay from genre to genre without a hitch in his dance step.”—Boston Sunday Globe

“Grand and elaborate . . . [Mitchell] creates a world and language at once foreign and strange, yet strikingly familiar and intimate.”—Los Angeles Times