Book description
”There exists a tribe of ants called the 'Slave-Maker'. These
insects raid the colonies of common ants, steal eggs back to their
own nests, & after they hatch, why, the stolen slaves become
workers of the greater empire & don't even dream they was ever
stolen. Now if you ask me, Lord Jehovah created these ants as a
model, Mr. Ewing, aye, as a map.” Mr. Wagstaff's gaze was gravid
with the ancient future. “For them with the eyes to see it.”
A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific Ocean in 1850; a
disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in Belgium
between the First and Second World Wars; a high-minded journalist in
Governor Reagan's California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland
creditors; the testament of a genetically modified 'dinery server' on
death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the
nightfall of science and civilisation - the narrators of Cloud
Atlas hear each other's echoes down the corridor of history, and
their destinies are changed in ways great and small.
In a novel of mindbending imagination and scope, David Mitchell
erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a
captivating meditation on humanity's dangerous will to power, and
where it might lead us.
