(Laughs.) It reminds me of what (Italo) Calvino said about (Laurence Sterne's) 'Tristram Shandy,' actually. That's quite a profound remark on a rainy Irish night. The English author's most loyal fans will also recognize that many of the characters and plot threads have been carried over from his previous novels, two of which ('Cloud Atlas' and 2001's 'number9dream') were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the United Kingdom's highest literary honor.Ī: Wow. Just underneath all this glittering hubbub, as Mitchell's readers have come to expect, is an ambitious meditation on mortality and survival. The story zigzags among places and times, from a small English village in the mid-1980s to the Swiss Alps during the Middle Ages to a Manhattan townhouse in the not-too-distant future. It centers on Holly Sykes, a teenage runaway who finds herself caught in the crossfire of an invisible war between rival mystics, and Hugo Lamb, an entitled Cambridge student who enters into a Faustian bargain to keep his youth in exchange for something he should never have considered doing without. On its surface, David Mitchell's 'The Bone Clocks,' the sprawling and unclassifiable new novel by the author of the best-selling 'Cloud Atlas' (2004), is a page-turning, time-traveling sci-fi yarn designed to appeal to the 'Dr.

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