The Bone Clocks - Softcover

Mitchell David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0340921617 ISBN 13: 9780340921616

Publisher: Sceptre, 2014

Synopsis

One drowsy summer's day in 1984, teenage runaway holly sykes encounters a strange woman who offers a small kindness in exchange for 'asylum'. Decades will pass before holly understands exactly what sort of asylum the woman was seeking . The bone clocks follows the twists and turns of holly's life from a scarred adolescence in gravesend to old age on ireland's atlantic coast as europe's oil supply dries up a life not so far out of the ordinary, yet punctuated by flashes of precognition, visits from people who emerge from thin air and brief lapses in the laws of reality. For holly sykes - daughter, sister, mother, guardian - is also an unwitting player in a murderous feud played out in the shadows and margins of our world and may prove to be its decisive weapon. Metaphysical thriller, meditation on mortality and chronicle of our self devouring times, this kaleidoscopic novel crackles with the invention and wit that have made david mitchell one of the most celebrated writers of his genera

About this title

Review

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, September 2014: Fans of David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet) have been salivating over the release of The Bone Clocks —and they have every reason to. This is a feast of a book—perhaps the author’s best to date—a saga that spans decades, characters, genres, and events from Mitchell's other novels. The structure is most similar to Cloud Atlas, with The Bone Clocks pivoting around a central character: Holly Sykes. Each chapter/novella is narrated from the perspective of an intersecting character, with settings ranging from England in the 80s to the apocalyptic future. Each story could stand alone as a work of genius, as they slowly build on Holly’s unwitting role in a war between two groups with psychic powers, culminating in a thrilling showdown reminiscent of the best of Stephen King. Taken together this is a hugely entertaining page-turner, an operatic fantasy, and an often heartbreaking meditation on mortality. It’s not to be missed. – Matt Kaye

About the Author

David Mitchell is the author of the novels Ghostwritten, number9dream, Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. He has won the John Llewellyn Rhys, Geoffrey Faber Memorial and South Bank Show Literature Prizes, and been shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize. In 2003, David Mitchell was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.

Edition details

• Publisher: Sceptre
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0340921617
• ISBN 13: 9780340921616
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 632