Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies ... 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 Reagans 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 others echoes down the corridor of history and their destinies are changed in ways great and small. In his extraordinary third novel David Mitchell erases the boundaries of language genre and time to offer a meditation on humanitys dangerous will to power and where it may lead us.