The whole book is told in the first-person and takes a peek at community, coincidence, catastrophe, fate, and causality all in the modern day. In all, there are nine chapters with a short coda concluding the book.
Each chapter in the book is centered around a different character, but the book is held together with certain things that are similar and would appear to be coincidental. This novel is set in many different places, like: USA, Ireland, Britain, Russia, and East Asia (where the bulk of the novel is set). “Ghostwritten” the first novel released by David Mitchell. Some will feature the standard one storyteller in one place. These will feature great depth and detail, requiring multiple reads (or taking notes) to keep track of everything flying around in the book. And sometimes, like in the case of “Ghostwritten” with many different narrators AND many different places. His novels tend to move around, either in location or in time. Mitchell graduated from the University of Kent with a degree in English and American Literature. Him and his wife also translated a book from Japanese to English called “The Reason I Jump”. Mitchell wrote a semi-autobiographical book called “Black Swan Green” that features a narrator with a stammer he believes that the book allowed him to be honest about his speech impediment, otherwise he believes that he never would have admitted he had a problem otherwise. He also has a stammer, and a son with autism. He has lived in Japan two times, and it helped him become a better writer, according to his own accounts. He and his wife Keiko Yoshida live, with their two kids, in County Cork, Ireland. One of the key questions arising from this design is whether Mitchell’s text articulates an anti-historical essentialism that posits some unchangeable ‘human nature’, or whether Cloud Atlas anticipates a cosmopolitanism yet to come.David Mitchell is the author of many short stories, operas, and novels, but none of his books have sequels. The six interlinked and nested narrative segments that constitute the composite text of Cloud Atlas are thematically connected by the confrontation of peaceable solidarity and brutal, dehumanizing predacity, whose most emblematic effect in the novel is the recurrent problem of genocidal enslavement. Moreover, Mitchell himself has been dubbed the ideal representative of a ‘new sincerity’ in British writing which, after the waning appeal of an allegedly irresponsibly playful ‘classical’ postmodernism, is perceived to combine reflexive textual manoeuvres with a serious concern with, if not commitment to, the pressing problems of an increasingly interdependent but by no means convivial world. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) has been widely discussed as a prominent specimen of the emergent genre of the ‘transnational’, ‘global’, ‘geopolitical’, ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘planetary’ novel.
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