Cloud At Last

This is a beautiful book. Incredibly structured. Not one but six impeccably detailed universes that nestle inside one another, like matryoshka dolls, connecting and intertwining, all written in a completely different vernacular and genre. You start in one world, it's interrupted, you're transported to the next, which loosely ties into the first, and then it happens again, and again, until you find yourself floating across time like a soul with unfinished business, a soul looking for its true purpose.

One character, who's working on his magnum opus of a music composition, aptly titled Cloud Atlas Sextet, has this to say: "Spent the fortnight gone in the music room, reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late."

This is what he creates. To say more about the plot(s) would be to ruin the fun of blind exploration. But if you're a David Mitchell fan, or a lover of books with fantastic covers, consider picking this up. Maybe not quite as good as Black Swan Green (I was really excited for this to trump BSG, so I could prove Josh Lesser wrong once and for all, but sadly, Lesser wins the day), but truly a lovely novel to get lost in for a nice long while.