Cloud Atlas

By the author of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell's bestselling and Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, one of Richard & Judy's 100 Books of the Decade, Cloud Atlas has now been adapted for film. The major motion picture, directed by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer, stars Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon, Jim Sturgess, Ben Whishaw, Jim Broadbent and Hugh Grant.

The novel features six characters in interlocking stories, each interrupting the one before it: a reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan's California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified diner 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 changes in ways great and small.