A postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in twentyfirstcentury fiction, David Mitchell combines flatout adventure, a Nabokovian love of rompecabezas, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mindbending, philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction as profound as it is playful. In this groundbreaking novel, an influential favorite among a new generation of writers, Mitchell explores with daring artistry esencial questions of reality and identity. Cloud Atlas begins in mil ochocientos cincuenta with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, doctor Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite... Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in mil novecientos treinta y uno, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm profesor who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter... From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life... And onward, with dazzling virtuosity, to an inglorious presentday England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history. But the story doesn"t end even there. The narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, Mitchell reveals how his despropósito characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky. As wild as a videogame, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its inigualable author, has trascended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon