And the thing was to do that thematically, so the whole thing wasn’t a butcher’s shop exercise with stories meaninglessly presented in a gimmicky way, without adding up to much. The main issue I had to approach was how to make the various novellas fit inside each other and to come up with ways of making the preceding narrative appear as an ‘artefact’ of the succeeding narrative. ‘The novel really began with the structure, the Russian Doll structure. I began by asking Mitchell how he approached such a complex task, faced with challenge of not only presenting these different stories and styles but making them mesh into a coherent whole.

Cloud Atlas takes the reader on a dizzying tour: from a 19 th century sailing ship to a post-Apocalyptic Hawaii, with stops in between at interwar Belgium, a noirish California, contemporary England, and Korea in the near, nightmarish future. (The work has just received the imprimatur of approval from the current arbiters of success in the British publishing world, the Richard and Judy Book Club). With his third work, Cloud Atlas, Mitchell not only garnered a second nomination for the book prize, he achieved a rare feat: He’s produced an ambitious literary novel that undertakes some of the techniques of experimental fiction as well as an accessible story with appeal to a broad audience. His second book, Number9dream (2001), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His first novel, Ghostwritten, was published in 1999 before the author turned 30. David Mitchell has repeatedly proved his talents at a chastening productive rate.

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