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The Bone Clocks

On sale

2nd September 2014

Price: £9.99

Folio Prize, 2015

Select a format

Selected: ebook / ISBN-13: 9781848945043

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‘ONE OF THE MOST BRILLIANTLY INVENTIVE WRITERS OF THIS, OR ANY, COUNTRY’ INDEPENDENT


Winner of the World Fantasy Award and longlisted for the Booker and Folio Prizes


‘A triumph’
GUARDIAN

‘Fantastical’
OBSERVER

‘Epic’
EVENING STANDARD

‘Mind-spinning’
INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

‘Dazzling’
NEW YORK TIMES

The internationally bestselling novel from the author of Cloud Atlas, at once the kaleidoscopic story of an unusual woman’s life, a metaphysical thriller and a profound meditation on mortality and survival


Run away, one drowsy summer’s afternoon, with Holly Sykes: wayward teenager, broken-hearted rebel and unwitting pawn in a titanic, hidden conflict.

Over six decades, the consequences of a moment’s impulse unfold, drawing an ordinary woman into a world far beyond her imagining. And as life in the near future turns perilous, the pledge she made to a stranger may become the key to her family’s survival . . .

PRAISE FOR DAVID MITCHELL


‘A thrilling and gifted writer’
FINANCIAL TIMES

‘Dizzyingly, dazzlingly good’
DAILY MAIL

‘Mitchell is, clearly, a genius’
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

‘An author of extraordinary ambition and skill’
INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

‘A superb storyteller’
THE NEW YORKER

Reviews

Oxford Student
The overwhelming impression is of an author at the height of his powers precisely because of a deep and intuitive understanding and curiosity of what it is about to live a life as a human being.
Viv Groskop, Books of the Year, Observer
Fantastical, ambitious, bold and exuberant
Stephanie Merritt, Books of the Year, Observer
A return to the exuberance and genre-hopping of Cloud Atlas, and a proper page-turner
Books of the Year, Evening Standard
An extraordinary piece of storytelling
Books of the Year, Guardian
Combines fantastic inventiveness with depth and heart
Independent on Sunday
A mind-spinning, genre-splicing time-travelling epic
Meg Wolitzer, NPR
One of the most entertaining and thrilling novels I've read in a long time . . . an extraordinary fun house of a novel
The Atlantic
A ludicrously ambitious, unstoppably clever epic told through a chorus of diverse narrators that is both outrageous in scope and meticulous in execution
Ursula K. Le Guin, Guardian
600 pages of metafictional shenanigans in relentlessly brilliant prose . . . Death is at the heart of this novel. And there lies its depth and darkness, bravely concealed with all the wit and sleight of hand and ventriloquistic verbiage and tale-telling bravura of which Mitchell is a master . . . It's a whopper of a story
Psychologies
Unmissable
Esquire
Wild, funny, terrifying . . . a slipstream masterpiece all its own
San Francisco Chronicle
Great fun . . . a tour de force
Boston Globe
Mitchell is one of the most electric writers alive. To open a Mitchell book is to set forth on an adventure . . . In his latest novel, The Bone Clocks, Mitchell has spun his most far-flung tale yet . . . Strange and magical
Entertainment Weekly
Magical . . . [it] perfectly illustrates the idea that we're all the heroes of our own lives as well as single cogs in a much larger and more beautiful mechanism
Time
Mind-bendingly ambitious . . . The force of [Mitchell's] storytelling makes The Bone Clocks a joy
Stephen King
Great story, great words, all good
New Yorker
Mitchell is a superb storyteller . . . One of the reasons he is such a popular and critically lauded writer is that he combines both the giddy, freewheeling ceaselessness of the pure storyteller with the grounded realism of the humanist. There's something for everyone, traditionalist or postmodernist, realist or fantasist
BuzzFeed
Deeply meaningful . . . The Bone Clocks has everything you might expect to find in a David Mitchell novel: Great characters in settings far-flung over space and time, all tied together by ambitious ideas and gorgeous writing
GQ
A sweeping epic . . . that, like Cloud Atlas, spans the ages and tinkers with the hidden gears of human history