Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies. A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific Ocean in 1850. A disinherited composer conning his way into the home of a dying genius in interwar Belgium. 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 along the corridor of history, echoes that change destinies in ways great and small. In a globe-encircling narrative reaching from the nineteenth century to a post-apocalyptic future, Cloud Atlas erases the boundaries of time, genre and language to offer an enthralling vision of humanity’s will to power, and where it will lead us.
