The Bone Clocks

Written by David Mitchell

Narrated by Jessica Lauren Ball, Leon Williams, Colin Mace and 3 more

David Mitchell is an eloquent conjurer of interconnected tales, a genre-bending daredevil, and a master prose stylist. His hypnotic new novel, The Bone Clocks, crackles with invention and wit-it is fiction at its most spellbinding and memorable. Following a scalding row with her mother, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on 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 from occupied 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. From the Hardcover edition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781490627878

Reviews for The Bone Clocks

[mrgan-2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Mitchell must have thought he was so clever and funny when half way through his multilayered novel he had a writer-character complain about a critique that panned his book for gracelessly combining shallow zeitgeist commentary with sudden fantasy elements. And of course, it then turns out that this is exactly what Mitchell's own book is.

It's not so much that the very concept of a novel consisting of 80% solid drama and 20% garble-filled woo-woo fantasy is off the table; if you can pull it off, go nuts. But Mitchell can't. The 20% fantasy stuff is truly, honestly terrible, and it not only ruins the book's overall effect, but it sells out some of the genuinely sweet and thrilling stuff that surrounds it by making it mythology fodder. Baffling.

[msemmag · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

TL;DR: Mitchell struggles with pacing, and I found the book to be a wee bit too pretentious and smug for my tastes. Be ready to be confused for most of the book. Readers who are more forgiving than I am will like this book just fine, but there is only so much narrative obfuscation that I can take before I just abandon the book on the grounds of try-hard authoring. Admittedly, my expectations were through the roof going in because of how much I enjoyed Mitchell's previous book, Cloud Atlas. But it's hard to not be a little disappointed with how unevenly this book was written. David Mitchell can be a transcendental storyteller at his best and utterly pretentious at his worst, and unfortunately this book showcases both. "The Bone Clocks" has the bones of a wildly original fantasy novel- the world-building that went into creating the Anchorites and Horology is unique and spellbinding. Unfortunately, the pacing of this novel is uneven at best and seems to struggle with integrating the stylistic choices he made with the overarching plot of the novel. For most of the novel, it's a series of slice-of-life stories about people who interact with the main character, who is a victim of mysterious forces at work, in a strict third-person limited sort of narrative. But two-thirds of the way through, Mitchell decides to dump this narrative conceit and the plot spirals into a standard fantasy thriller. (Which isn't bad, but I found it to be jarring.)The main arc of the story concludes at page 548, and then we are subjected to almost 100 pages of epilogue (view spoiler) that doesn't seem at all connected to any of the plot and isn't foreshadowed at all in the rest of the book. It reads more as a separate short story/novella than anything else, and I am shocked this extraneous dongle got left in during the editing process.The tone of Mitchell's writing can also be a huge turn-off to the less patient reader. Mitchell can't help but insert a heaping dose of oh-aren't-I-clever in both the plot and his characters. The quintessential example of what I'm talking about is (view spoiler). Given a choice, Mitchell will always sacrifice an original idea for the opportunity to insert another oblique call back to a book he wrote that no one cares about.(GoodReads review, posted on February 4, 2017)

[pepperwings · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I really wanted to like this book. I heard about it on NPR, and the supernatural elements seemed interesting, and I thought that would be a larger part of the story, at least in the background. It took more than 2/3 of the book to even *get* to that part, and it was not what I expected, or anything like I had hoped, it was frightfully disappointing. But *that* part would have been ok, other parts of the story were interesting, and could have gone somewhere. I don't want to spoil it for those who want to read it, so I won't, however, overall, I liked it, but I felt large portions could have been cut out for this type of story, and the ending could have been better. About 250 pages too long, and a lot of them are from the middle.

[karenherndon · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wow, I loved ths book! I read his Cloud Atlas and liked it too- even tho the rest of my book club didn't . I like this even better.For me, his stories take some time to get hooked on. The way he writes them in sections- in the first half of his novels I find myself frustrated because of the way he ends each section leaving you hanging then starting the new section with a completely different character and story. I think this was what discouraged my book club members from finishing the book. But, 3/4 of the way thru I am hooked- this is when he begins to weave the stories together and I can see how they link. His books take me longer to read than most but only because his writing is so beautifully put together that I want to digest it all.I highly recommend this book.

[phil5james · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Totally superlative. I loved every bit of this, as much or maybe more than "Cloud Atlas"
There are his usual hints and references to his previous books but here is a suggestion that they are all included in one overall meta-fiction or indeed all organically grown from one central idea--- The reincarnation or transmigration of souls.

[dougj110 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I saw this book as a book of 3 sections, separate and distinct from each other, yet involving many of the same characters: the first section was a young woman's adventure, with a few unexplained and out of context, occult events. Part two transformed the story completely into the realm of the occult and the final section described a sad post-apocalyptic world.Each of these sections could have stood on their own, as short stories. At first, I found the transition, from one part to the next, a little disappointing, as I am someone who is used to a tale that progresses in a linear fashion. I got used to, and came to enjoy the disruption, and look forward to reading more by this author.

[chrisblocker · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

David Mitchell returns with a familiar device and many familiar names. In fact, The Bone Clocks should be a very familiar book to those already acquainted with Mitchell's writing. I'd like to say Mitchell does something extraordinary here, but mostly what he does is rehash his success. The Bone Clocks bears much similarity to Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten. The same structure of episodic stories following different characters around the globe and through the years is at play here. The connecting piece in The Bone Clocks is the character of Holly Sykes. The theme of incorporeals migrating from one body to another is used again. Despite the lack of original material—in the world that is David Mitchell—it is fun to once again to visit Mitchell's universe and see it all being put together.If you've read more than one David Mitchell novel, you probably know that Mitchell likes to tie his stories and novels together. I read an interview with him where he described all of his works coming together to create an über-novel. Some may find the concept a bit too heavy of a ploy, but I love it. It's fun to play the “who's who” game when reading Mitchell. Of all of Mitchell's novels, The Bone Clocks works the hardest to bring all these pieces together. I counted six characters from previous Mitchell novels who made direct appearances (in one form or another). Add to that another five who were mentioned, and other characters who are likely descendents of characters we've met before. (And I'm sure I missed some.) Perhaps it was a bit too much, but it was fun. (Were there any references to number9dream? It was the only novel I couldn't make a connection to.)What makes The Bone Clocks different from Mitchell's previous novels is the amount of paranormal fantasy. Sure, it's there to some extent in all of Mitchell's work, but he definitely turns it up a couple notches here. I don't think I'm too far from reason when I say that it felt like a collaborative effort with Stephen King. And when the novel was hitting its climax in Part 5, it was straight up Ghostbusters 2—creepy Vigo portrait and all. The action was all over the place and I had trouble following everything that was going on. Personally, I thought this added tension was over the top; I'd have preferred the novel stick with the momentum it had established in the first four sections.The first two-thirds of The Bone Clocks is great. It really hits its stride by the second story and really moves in the third and fourth. Even though everything that happens in those four stories adds up to the fifth, that fifth almost felt like a completely different novel. And then the sixth—well, it seemed more like an afterthought. I imagine Mitchell sitting back after completing the novel and realizing—with horror—that he didn't include a futuristic scene where our dependence on technology has become our demise (see also Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas, “The Siphoners”). “Wait, everyone, we need all the characters to come back for one final scene.” Sure, it brings together some of the unresolved issues, but it did so with such an inorganic feel. I think this novel would've been better served with a different finale and saving this one for a short story down the line.I don't know what else to say about this one—perhaps I've already said too much. I know there's been tremendous hype surrounding this one, but I'd personally put it in the bottom half of Mitchell's bibliography. That being said, it's good, even great at times. But with all the connections and callbacks to previous works, I think it's better to make your way through those first, if you haven't already.

[albertgoldfain · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A well-woven tapestry of episodes, each thread of which is satisfying in its own way. This book will be perpetually compared to Cloud Atlas, but apart from the time and character jumping narrative, this is really a different sort of work. The action parts of the Marinus episode seem a little "video game", but Mitchell does succeed in creating a unique take on atemporality and the story remains grounded in the humanity of Holly Sykes.

[charlie68_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A pretty good read, prose is good, plotting is long winded and could of been cut to make it shorter. I enjoyed the different locations, Australia, Iceland, Colombia even war-torn Iraq just to name a few.

[donna828 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Holly Sykes has what she calls daymares that were cured by Dr. Marimus when she was a child--or were they? She runs away from home when she is 15 and becomes a bit like Alice in Wonderland, except her adventures are of the lethal kind. Such a strange beginning until one gets used to the side trips into Fantasyland. David Mitchell has a vivid imagination and the writing skill to make me enjoy a genre that I don't usually care for. Time travel and warring factions of regenerated souls is pretty far out there in lala land for me. But Mr. Mitchell has created such compelling characters that I found myself turning page after page to see what happens to them. Holly asks Dr. Marimus if what she is experiencing is technology or the M-word. The reply, "Magic's just normal you're not used to," made sense to me because as I kept reading about all the paranormal events, I relaxed and began to think of them as real, if far-out, possibilities. Once again, structure plays an important role in Mitchell's book. Each of the six sections is told from a different point of view, coming full circle to Holly again. It was interesting to see the connections between characters in this book and even a few from other books by the author. I wasn't quite as enthralled with the story as I was with Cloud Atlas, but it is entertaining and thought provoking. Another good solid read from an amazing storyteller.

[missizicks · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Bone Clicks is an accomplished novel. Mitchell seems to have worked out what his previous flirtations with time travelling souls is all about, and it's a curious mix of mysticism, Cathars and science fiction. I liked the allusion to Buddhist belief that the departing soul needs 49 days to find a new body. I also liked the pragmatism of the Horologists. The Atemporals I found a bit too sketchy as a concept. Perhaps Mitchell was hoping to achieve something more akin to Eco. He missed, and I was left feeling he should have gone for the Glenn Duncan/Last Werewolf approach. The final showdown between the Horologists and Atemporals wasn't thrilling or dangerous enough. The human stories of Holly, Ed and Aoife were gripping, though. Crispin Hershey's segment was a bit cheesy. Lord Brittan/Lord Sugar? Come on, Mitchell, you're better than that! And Hershey was another from the box of smug, tedious, white male wankers whom I found it hard to care about. But he moved the plot along. Over all, though, I really enjoyed it, as I have enjoyed the other books by David Mitchell.

[Laurie Richard · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great book
Love the intertwining storylines and how they all meet up eventually
Only gripe would be that the last section of the book wasn’t really needed but did tie up the story

[lizzied_11 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm sorry to say that The Bone Clocks was something of a disappointment. All the elements for prime entertainment were there, but somehow Mitchell missed his mark this time. I was also expecting a book of more substance, and substantial themes and thought were not intended even though a section spent outside Baghdad and another showing the dissolution of Western Europe 30 years from now were seriously disturbing. Mitchell accurately presents contemporary culture from the 70's through the present, but he adds some mystic goodies (third eyes, more or less immortal beings at war, a chapel devoted to life of a sort overlooking the valley of Death) and the blend didn't work for me. Tim Powers can do this stuff effectively, but Mitchell didn't bring it off. The central character is one Holly Sykes, who with her brother Jacko, is born with an "invisible eye" and psychic sensitivity. The novel follows her from a self-absorbed 15 year-old to a wise and self-sacrificing 76. For a good part of the book she is the first person, present tense narrator. When we meet her the second time, she's easy to like, but the book rests on her shoulders, and a reader looking for some depth doesn't find much. Maybe Holly is the reason I was disappointed. I'll be glad to give Mr. Mitchell another chance, but this is not the book that people will remember him for.

[iansales_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

According to my records, I read Cloud Atlas back in April 2009, likely as a result of recommendations by friends and acquaintances. I thought the novel good, but it didn’t quite gel for me. I then worked my way through Mitchell’s oeuvre – number9dream, Ghostwritten, Black Swan Green and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet – over the following three years. Last year, The Bone Clocks was published… Initial noises were good, but then a few dissenting voices appeared… What was clear, however, was that it was structured as a series of linked novellas and that it moved deeper into genre territory as it progressed. I was, I admit, expecting a novel not unlike Cloud Atlas, one that had many impressive pieces but together left me feeling a little disappointed. Happily, this wasn’t the case at all. True, you wait for a book about conspiracies of body-hopping immortals and three come along at once – there are elements of The Bone Clocks that are reminiscent of Claire North’s Touch and of Marcel Theoux’s Strange Bodies – although for secret wars masterminded by hidden groups, you might as well go all the way back to EE ‘Doc’ Smith’s Arisians and Eddorians. The Bone Clocks follows Holly Sykes from her teen years in southern England, when she runs away from home, through to a post-apocalyptic Ireland some thirty years from now. Along the way, other voices occasionally take over the narrative, such as egocentric author Crispin Hershey (based on Martin Amis?), a well-handled pastiche although it reminds me of Charles Palliser’s brilliant piss-take of Jeffrey Archer in Betrayals; and even one of the immortals, who is, at that time, occupying the body of a black Canadian psychologist. The two factions at war are the Horologists, who are serial reincarnators and seem to have arisen naturally among humans; and the Anchorites of the Chapel of the Dusk of the Blind Cathar, who are able to “decant” souls in order to extend their own lives. Holly becomes inadvertently involved with these two groups, partly because one of the immortals reincarnates in her younger brother, partly because the Horologists prevent her from being groomed to be “decanted”, and partly because she has a brief fling with Hugo Lamb, who is recruited by the Anchorites. Holly is a great character and Mitchell handles her brilliantly. Some of the other elements I found less successful – the Anchorites reminded me a little of the baddies in the bande dessinée L’Histoire secrète by Jean-Pierre Pécau (both have chief villains with no eyes); and the post-apocalypse scenario hewed somewhat too closely to the common template. Much has also been made of those characters which have appeared in other Mitchell novels and stories, but this is hardly unique nor does it add much to this novel. Nonetheless, a very good book, and I’m looking forward to reading Slade House.

[ardvisoor · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I am really struggling with what to rate this book. I did enjoy parts of it, but ultimately, I found it really too long.

[jacobseifert-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I was very disappointed with this book. The fascinating thing about David Mitchell's work for me has always been the natural way he weaves the inexplicable, the fantastic, or maybe "magic" into his novels. Yet in The Bone Clocks, Mitchell focuses on the "magic", resulting in a plot-drive novel that feels neither authentic nor magical. The novel feels as if it were forced into telling a story that Mitchell wanted to tell--one that is incredibly uncreative and not compelling.

[klmesoftly · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Yet again I'm left feeling kind of disappointed in the ending to a novel - I hope this doesn't become a pattern this month! Structurally the book is split into 6 roughly 100-page sections, each section jumping forward a decade or so in time and focusing on a handful of different characters whose lives sometimes intersect. The first 300 pages were sometimes challenging as a result, as they were basically the intro chunks to what felt like 3 different novels, all stacked together - so just as I would get to the point where I was getting my bearings and settling in comfortably, the section would end and a new one would begin (similarly to the other Mitchell novel I've read and loved, Cloud Atlas). Sections 4 and 5 are much more connected and this was where I really started to enjoy the book, and frequently caught myself making comments like "I can't wait for you to read this, I really like it!" to my roommate. Section 6, though, is more of an extended "and then there were children and old age" epilogue than anything, as all of the interesting, plotty action of the story has already taken place and all of the characters that have already been introduced have basically been wrapped up. I wound up almost skimming through the last 50 pages, waiting for anyone I cared about as a reader to come back, or for some element of the fantasy worldbuilding that hadn't yet been depicted to the author's satisfaction to reveal itself - nothing, really, and I'm left honestly puzzled by Mitchell's decision to include the 6th section in the novel at all. It's easy to compare The Bone Clocks to [Cloud Atlas] - both are split into sections that deal with different point-of-view characters, and both involve a lot of partially-told stories abruptly dropped or picked up in the middle. Obviously it's subjective, but to me the experimental structure of Cloud Atlas didn't feel gratuitous; The Bone Clocks does - or worse, it feels like a handwavey avoidance of certain writerly plot development work at best, an excuse to take tangents into issue novel territory at worst: Here Is An Infodump Of David Mitchell's Thoughts About Iraq. Here Are Some Of David Mitchell's Thoughts About Oil And Climate Change. (which would be fine, if these sections had more than the barest, most tangential connection to the main "plot" of the novel.)I'm giving this novel 3.5 stars (4 on Goodreads) for sections 1, 2, 4, and 5 (and partial credit for 3, though it's the most wandering and ultimately not-super-relevant of the early chapters, and oddly placed as the novel's midsection, when you'd most expect things to really begin coming together). It's unfortunate when a challenging, engaging novel runs out of steam at the end - I'm trying not to let it sour my enjoyment of the earlier 550-odd pages!

[john liles · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed this book. To me it was a fun journey into imagination. Different with lots of fun twists and turns.

[durgaprsd04-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A good book indeed but quite long.

[jkdavies · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

shelfari ate my review....

it was a bloody good review and a bloody good book

[antrat1965 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Mr. Mitchell is one hell of a writer. The only reason I didn't give this five stars was because I found "the big showdown" between the two warring immortals kind of lame and predictable.
I would be interested in reading a book by David Mitchell that doesn't contain any supernatural elements. I found this book shined best when telling the stories of his very interesting characters.

[therebelprince · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I adore David Mitchell's work, even if I never quite know what to make of him.

In one corner of my duelling mind lies the knowledge that this is my least favourite of his works thus far, although this is primarily an indicator of how much I adored Ghostwritten, Black Swan Green and Cloud Atlas, not to mention the sublime and subtle vintage of Thousand Autumns. Perhaps it's the constant monologues, always so dense regardless of which character is speaking them, reminding me more of Bernard Shaw than of the 21st century. Or the tantalising final chapter, that could have made an entire book on its own, which suggests that a more fascinating and human story lurks in the fringes of what is written here.

Yet, in the other corner, wearing a tattered and post-apocalyptic outfit, is my realisation that I was captivated by this book. I found myself staying up late, smiling like a loon as I determined to get through just five more pages. Mitchell stuffs his narrative with so many clever true-life touches, haunting images, and palpable subplots, that one is never bored. The Bone Clocks is the kind of novel that can easily be revisited for endless tchotchkes lining the literary walls. The characters herein - many of whom, or their ancestors, can be found in the pages of Mitchell's other works if one looks hard enough - are rarely straightforward, with most of the villains complicated and all of the heroes laced with vices.

Although Mitchell has always flirted with the otherworldly, he seems to be a rationalist at heart, so I was surprised to realise how much this novel relied upon the fantastic. Yet, are generic boundaries merely a way for booksellers to organise their wares? Are not Orlando, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Lathe of Heaven, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Nights at the Circus some of my other favourite novels, as they merge literary fiction with supreme gifts of imagination? So, yes. It took me the entire book to make up my mind, but I'm quite delighted with this. If pressed, I'd acknowledge that the extra burden placed on Mitchell's imagination to create the worlds of the novel may have resulted in not enough time spent on the oft-repetitive dialogue, but that's a minor point. Onward to Slade House!

[jspilman-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Again, several stories with a fantasy element set in the real world, with an overarching plot delivered over the space of a lifetime. I loved the character of Holly, and she held the story together.

[gendeg-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

David Mitchell's latest novel is a force of nature. Reading The Bone Clocks felt like unraveling a puzzle overseen by some omnipresent, all-seeing Oz. Or maybe a more apt description is holding a nautilus in your hand, noting its whorls that make up the whole breathing creature that is the universe of the book. It just keeps growing on you... Read and relish this book slowly. Don't speed read. Linger. I'm a fast reader, but I took my sweet time with this one. There are multitudes and tonalities here that emerge like time lapse photography of something growing, expanding.Mitchell is best known as a master prose stylist known for his genre-bending writing. With The Bone Clocks, he doesn't pull off the literary triple axle so much as a gruelingly satisfying relay race, where several characters take over narration at junctures to carry the story forward. Cloud Atlas, which everyone seems to want to compare The Bone Clocks to, is much more acrobatic, bending not only in place and time but literary narrative styles, each chapter its own standalone novella. In contrast, The Bone Clocks feels more grounded, coherent, like a conventional book, even with its jagged mix of realism and fantasy. In many ways, The Bone Clocks felt like a more fluid, mature Cloud Atlas; just as Cloud Atlas was a more fluid and mature Ghostwritten. The say that ambitious writers write the same novel over and over again to improve it with each new book. Mitchell has done that and more with The Bone Clocks.The Bone Clocks is similar to Cloud Atlas in its six-part structure that plays the scales from naive past to dark, uncertain future, but events are distilled within the lifetime of one character, Holly Sykes. Unlike Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks has a clear protagonist in Holly, though she isn't always our narrator. In the beginning of the book, we meet Holly as a hard-headed teenager living in Kent in Thatcher-era 1980s and by the end of the book, as a fiercely protective grandmother living in Ireland in an apocalyptic 2040s. During most of her life, though, we only get glimpses of her through the first-person eyes of other characters—four others in total. This may seem jarring but it actually works movingly because we discover and get to know Holly from all these different tangents, seeing and experiencing her life without being inside her head. This gives the storytelling a cinematic quality because you are watching Holly through her impact and influence on others. Distance and intimacy.Expect a lot of globe-trotting. Across the span of 600-plus pages, Mitchell takes you to towns and cities like Gravesend, New York City, the Hudson Valley, Toronto, Vancouver, Shanghai, Cartagena, as well as grabs your hand and darts across Iceland, Switzerland, Russia, Australia, and Iraq. Along with a strong sense of place (Mitchell could be a travel writer, seriously), there is a strong sense of time as well. Past, present, and future are represented here both in the propulsive, forward-moving main narrative and in the memories and recollections of various characters.And that's just the human world of temporality. Because, of course, Mitchell doesn't just create worlds, he creates a whole other universe in the creation of two groups of immortals or Atemporals: the Horologists and Anchorites. The Horologists are immortal by default. They live out their lives like mortals, die, and then return forty-nine days in a body whose soul has departed, usually a child, and usually a child with exceptional psychic sensitivities. The Anchorites, on the other hand, are immortal through a kind of soul-eating cannibalism that recalls the recent book Doctor Sleep by Stephen King and the horror-stylings of Clive Barker. These baddies hunt down these special children and "decant" their souls. Mortals are their quarry; good ole Horologists try to stop them. It is a very black-and-white, good-versus-evil kind of conflict, not very nuanced. When we first get to know the surly teenaged Holly, a First Mission by the Horologists has failed tragically; they are scattered and broken. Later when we see middle-aged Holly, the Horologists try for a Second Mission that leads to a spectacular, climatic siege that made me think of Harry Potter fight scenes. This war plays out in the background, with occasional terrifying forays into reality in the early half of the book, though by the middle and latter half becomes thoroughly embroiled and entwined in our/Holly's world (and her head). More than any idea that comes across in the book are the ideas of ties and kinship. Everything is connected ... is something that permeates all of Mitchell's books. His books may feel vast and humanity small in them but at the heart of his writing—and The Bone Clocks is no exception—people matter. What we experience and decide to do matters. We see this most earnestly in Cloud Atlas where acts of cruelty and kindness have consequences that ripple across time and space. Above the din of the action and plotting, The Bone Clocks is very much a book about action being set into motion by small acts, often unseen and unheard, or sometimes quickly "redacted" from conscious memory, as happens a lot in The Bone Clocks. This gives the book a kind of fairy-tale quality in a way. Consider the fateful early scene where Holly meets an old woman and makes her a promise in exchange for a drink of tea. Or, when a character in his love-smitten state, remarks: "Experimentally, silently, I mouth I love you ... No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same." If I explain more about this line it would be egregiously spoiling but know that this undeclared devotion will matter critically later. Then, toward the climax of the book, a labyrinth that we first heard about obliquely in the first few pages makes a big splash.It all ties beautifully together.The Bone Clocks treads this same thematic path of kinship both within the novel but also across all the previous books as well. What many fans will surely find thrilling is that Mitchell creates connections, linking to characters in his previous novels, most notably Black Swan Green, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Number9 Dream, and Cloud Atlas. There is an actual word for this, unsurprisingly: metalepsis, the "paradoxical transgression of the boundaries between narrative levels or logically distinct worlds." If anyone transgresses with panache, it's certainly Mitchell in The Bone Clocks. As we've seen before, he regularly imports and exports his own props and characters from earlier works, blurring the boundaries of each novel as a self-contained narrative. It is recurrence but not duplication, though, since Mitchell makes his references through ancestry, reincarnation, or a retelling of a character. By the end of The Bone Clocks, the fantasy action has shifted to a more speculative, dystopian bent. While we've moved on from the Atemporal war, Holly is faced with a much more real, tangible threat. It is a disturbing chapter to end with and yet there is a glimmer of hope, as an old friend of Holly makes an appearance to repay a kind act, just as Holly once did. Actions and reactions. The writing itself is Michell-esque. Per usual, if you've read his other novels, Mitchell gives us observational vertigo that offers the smell of London streets, the heat of the Baghdad sun, or even the movements of shadow and light as precious, unforgettable fragments. You will be highlighting or underlining like crazy in The Bone Clocks.There are a few snooty critics from The New Yorker and elsewhere who have blasted The Bone Clocks as a fantasy hack. My inner thug/ardent Mitchell groupie wants to treat those book reviewers to the same fate as Felix Finch in Cloud Atlas or Richard Cheeseman in The Bone Clocks, but the naysayers do have their points ("intricate replications ... but what do they amount to") and they at least acknowledge that Mitchell is a phenomenal storyteller and novelist. I just don't think they really get Mitchell. So yeah he's given us a literary book about an inter-dimensional war between incorporeal shape-shifters who can ingress and egress through our minds and fight each other with incantations fueled by psychovoltage. Um, who can do that? Who can get the hearts of both genre fans and literary fans a-beating? My final grumble: The Bone Clocks should have made the Booker Prize shortlist.(I'm a huge fan of Mitchell's work. If you are, too, and want a full bibliography, check out Everything You Could Possibly Want to Know About David Mitchell, which has interviews, reviews, essays, and a lot more.)

[justagirlwithabook · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was the second book of Mitchell’s that I’ve read. I picked it up very soon after Slade House and felt like I was getting a cup full of the same rather than the little teaspoon that Slade House had offered me. I really enjoyed it — it was full of all the strange creepiness that Slade House had but really wove a tale around characters and all their connections. I really enjoyed it and look forward to reading more from this author!

[pharmacdon · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The story line would have been interesting enough without the fantasy. Although the plot line continues with the use of the fantasy. The writing itself is worth reading the book.

[lamotamant · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

So, I finished this book two minutes ago, uttered a satisfyingly noncommittal 'wow', and got on GoodReads to stick my little flag in the depths of it's book jacket and claim it conquered. I've read Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green was actually my first introduction to David Mitchell back in 2007. Caught sight of this book while browsing at the library and figured it might be great or it might be drivel, who really knows.

Right this moment I feel like voting for the former, to an extent. I tend to split hairs over genre-benders, feeling that, more often than not, they're the result of multiple books mashed together into a hodgepodge of inconsistent character development, rushed plot lines, and leaping g-a-p-s of back info or an overabundance of same. The hairs being splitted, I'd say there was a bit of fantasy-smashing into this book as well. However, I'd also say it worked to an extent that it might not have if this was developed into a series or a pair of novellas. The novel encompasses the very act of fantasy-meets-life along the course of a set number of years. What better way to demonstrate the crashing set of facts thrust upon Holly (and others) than to let them crash into the story itself?

All in all, a satisfying read that was written with a good amount of wit, sarcasm, and interest. I'd definitely suggest it.

[nwhyte-2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is an ambitious book, structured as six stories told by separate viewpoint characters roughly a decade apart from 1984 to 2043. I found some of the sections did not work at all for me, but the final chunk, set in a post-apocalyptic dystopian Ireland, is very good and is the only bit that really qualifies as science fiction - the core narrative concerns different factions body-hopping entities who are able to cast what are essentially magic spells at each other and on hapless humans.I was perhaps unreasonably annoyed by several lapses of detail. The University of Cambridge doesn't offer economics and political science on the same course (unlike Oxford), or at least didn't in the early 1990s when that section is set. One character makes a gratuitous point about the Icelandic letter Þ being pronounced like "th" in "lathe", but it's not - it's usually more like the "th" in "thick". Later on there's a comment about Russians learning their "AЬBs" - but the second letter of the Cyrillic alphabet is Б not Ь. It is just lazy to show off and yet get it wrong.Putting that (with difficulty!) aside, I felt that the excellence of the final section does not make up for the unevenness of the rest of the book and the fantasy rather than science fiction nature of the set-up. But I look forward to discussing further.

[kara.shamy · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I could hardly have been more disappointed by The Bone Clocks. Thanks to LibraryThing's wonderful Early Reviewers program, I received a free advanced edition of the book and was given my first experience reading the work of David Mitchell. The high opinion, as well as love, of his work held by so many readers I believe to be insightful and whose opinions I value inspired in me a high expectation of this author. Reading him has long been a personal must, and when The Bone Clocks made the Booker prize longlist I determined that reading it should be an immediate priority.Unfortunately, I so hated the book's first few pages that some enjoyment and appreciation of the great many pages that followed thereafter could not together outweigh the effect of that first bad impression. To be specific, I found the novel's protagonist, Holly Sykes, to be unworthy of my time -- still less my thought or sympathy -- as a reader of literary fiction. I know this judgment will hold over time, although I mean to re-read this novel in the hope of feeling more the novel's strengths. It is in expectation of this greater enjoyment of this book that I give it the benefit of the doubt and award it no less than three stars at this time.While this work of art is critically flawed in my view, I have no doubt it will please many readers.

[dbsovereign · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Mitchell is a master at mixing genre and this book is ostensibly a fantasy, but it is one tinted by some pretty brutal reality. The careful reader will recognize people from earlier books by Mitchell. I was a bit bewildered by the transition from the first section to the second at least at first, and the last section seemed a different book entirely...