David Mitchell

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 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 changes in ways great and small. Mitchell's other novels are GHOSTWRITTEN, BLACK SWAN GREEN and NUMBER9DREAM, all published by Sceptre. www.sceptrebooks.com Facebook: Sceptre Books Twitter: SceptreBooks

Cloud Atlas

Klára Kováčiková 

As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself and moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent.

She holds forth like a man and smokes myrrhy cigarettes through a rhino horn holder.

When one unlocks a woman´s body, her box of confidences also spills.

One writes music because winter is eternal and because if one didn´t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one´s throat all the sooner.

Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, are another wonder of Outside to me.

Snow´s whites are bruised lilacs in half light.

Cloud Atlas quotes

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