Never Won a Major Prize
Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell
Summary
Six nested stories leapfrog from an 1849 Pacific sea voyage through prewar Belgium, 1970s California, present day England, a dystopian corporate Korea, and a post apocalyptic Hawaii, each narrative interrupted halfway and completed in reverse order on the way back down. Mitchell gives every era its own fully realized voice and genre, binding the whole with recurring souls and a meditation on predation and civilization. The novel became one of the most acclaimed and structurally daring British novels of its decade.
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Historical Context & Significance
The novel was shortlisted for the 2004 Booker Prize but lost to Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. It won the British Book Award for literary fiction, a retail industry honor voted well outside the major juried prize circuit.