Summary: "A vast, intricate novel that weaves six narratives and spans from 1984 to the 2030s about a secret war between a cult of soul-decanters and a small group of vigilantes called the Night Shift who try to take them down. An up-all-night story that fluently mixes the super-natural, sci-fi, horror, social satire, and hearbreaking realism"-- Provided by publisher.
LJ Express Reviews
In his breathtaking, audacious, stampedingly beautiful latest, Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) uses the battle between evil soul decanters and good Horologists, who are masterminded by the wise, powerful, body-shifting Marinus, to tell a much larger story. It's a story that embraces the life of Holly Sykes, from a bad boyfriend moment in the Talking Heads era, discovering that her brother has gone missing, running from home, witnessing the first bloody clash between good and evil when people who take her in are murdered, then recognizing her psychic powers and continuing the run to a snowbound resort in the Alps. There, she encounters sly Hugo, an amoral lout aspiring to the upper crust who redeems himself somewhat by discovering that he loves her. Holly goes on to marry war reporter Ed, who refuses to acknowledge Holly's connection to the beyond; wins fame writing a book about her experiences, leading to some wonderfully rendered satire about the writer's world; and finally plays her part in the final battle between the ethereal forces that have been tracking her all along. (Then the narrative moves to war and ecological crash in the 2040s; bad stuff never stops.) This really isn't a book about Holly, though, but about the variety of fantastically rendered worlds we move through as her story unfolds—which is to say our world, past, present, and looming future, brought to us through a fantasy underpinning that juices up the narrative but isn't its heart. Mitchell's not doing genre but asking us ever-ticking bone clocks to stop being so comfortable with how we measure ourselves and our world: "Beware of asking people to question what's real and what isn't. They may reach conclusions you didn't see coming." Verdict Quite a lot of book and not for easy-reading fans, but it's brilliant. [See Prepub Alert, 5/19/14.]—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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