The Bone Clocks: A Novel

The New York Times bestseller by the author of Cloud Atlas | Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize

"With The Bone Clocks, [David] Mitchell rises to meet and match the legacy of Cloud Atlas."--Los Angeles Times

Following a terrible fight with her mother over her boyfriend, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her family and her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: A sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as "the radio people," Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life.

For Holly has caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics--and their enemies. But her lost weekend is merely the prelude to a shocking disappearance that leaves her family irrevocably scarred. This unsolved mystery will echo through every decade of Holly's life, affecting all the people Holly loves--even the ones who are not yet born.

A Cambridge scholarship boy grooming himself for wealth and influence, a conflicted father who feels alive only while reporting on the war in Iraq, a middle-aged writer mourning his exile from the bestseller list--all have a part to play in this surreal, invisible war on the margins of our world. From the medieval Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a hotel in Shanghai to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future, their stories come together in moments of everyday grace and extraordinary wonder.

Rich with character and realms of possibility, The Bone Clocks is a kaleidoscopic novel that begs to be taken apart and put back together by a writer The Washington Post calls "the novelist who's been showing us the future of fiction."

An elegant conjurer of interconnected tales, a genre-bending daredevil, and a master prose stylist, David Mitchell has become one of the leading literary voices of his generation. His hypnotic new novel, The Bone Clocks, crackles with invention and wit and sheer storytelling pleasure--it is fiction at its most spellbinding.

Praise for The Bone Clocks

"Astonishing . . . [Mitchell's] brought together the time-capsule density of his eyes-wide-open adventure in traditional realism with the death-defying ambitions of Cloud Atlas."--The New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)

"One of the most entertaining and thrilling novels I've read in a long time."--Meg Wolitzer, NPR

"Magical . . . 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. [Grade:] A"--Entertainment Weekly

"Rich in detail and incident, funny, rueful and terrifying by turns, The Bone Clocks is a tour de force."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Mitchell is one of the most electric writers alive. . . .The Bone Clocks [is] his most far-flung tale yet."--The Boston Globe

"A slipstream masterpiece . . . Mitchell is a genre-bending, time-leaping, world-traveling, puzzle-making, literary magician."--Esquire

"A rich selection of domestic realism, gothic fantasy and apocalyptic speculation . . . another example of Mitchell's boundless dexterity."--The Washington Post