The New York Times bestseller by the author of Cloud Atlas • Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize • Named One of the Top Ten Fiction Books of the Year by Time, Entertainment Weekly, and O: The Oprah Magazine • A New York Times Notable Book • An American Library Association Notable Book • Winner of the World Fantasy Award “With The Bone Clocks, [David] Mitchell rises to meet and match the legacy of Cloud Atlas.”—Los Angeles Times Following a terrible fight with her mother over her boyfriend, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her family and 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 on the war in 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 by a writer The Washington Post calls “the novelist who’s been showing us the future of fiction.” An elegant conjurer of interconnected tales, a genre-bending daredevil, and a master prose stylist, David Mitchell has become one of the leading literary voices of his generation. His hypnotic new novel, The Bone Clocks, crackles with invention and wit and sheer storytelling pleasure—it is fiction at its most spellbinding. Named to more than 20 year-end best of lists, including NPR • San Francisco Chronicle • The Atlantic • The Guardian • Slate • BuzzFeed “One of the most entertaining and thrilling novels I’ve read in a long time.”—Meg Wolitzer, NPR “[Mitchell] writes with a furious intensity and slapped-awake vitality, with a delight in language and all the rabbit holes of experience.”—The New York Times Book Review “Intensely compelling . . . fantastically witty . . . offers up a rich selection of domestic realism, gothic fantasy and apocalyptic speculation.”—The Washington Post “[A] time-traveling, culture-crossing, genre-bending marvel of a novel.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Great fun . . . a tour de force . . . [Mitchell] channels his narrators with vivid expertise.”—San Francisco Chronicle

A lot of NUBClub members are very big fans of Mitchell, so this was a high stakes read for us. Unfortunately, most of us were disappointed. The book started strongly, with the dense and beautiful style that we love about Mitchell, and the themes stayed within Mitchell's wheelhouse of con artists, bullies, and victims of the powerful being exploited. It also had just enough magical realism with ghosts and strange time manipulations. But then the third act comes, and the wheels come off the bus in a shocking cheesy way. What was previously a mysterious set of coincidences and manipulations becomes a defined enemy in an alternate dimension. What was previously a motley assortment of haphazardly colliding strangers became an adventure party. And, most horrifyingly of all, what was a careful and well paced literary story become a faux-action blockbuster boss fight. There was a chase scene. There was a psychic duel. Seriously. Now, we supposed if this was a fantasy novel by a skilled genre author, this could have worked, but Mitchell is not a skilled genre author, and so it was stilted and overwrought and frankly embarrassing. After writing so many powerfully ambivalent and unresolved novels, we just couldn't understand as a group while Mitchell had to go to such a pat plot conclusion and such hokey action movie tropes. So while a few of us could hold on to the good in Mitchell and enjoy the ride, the rest of us were left stunned, wondering where the incredible writer of the first half went and why such a consistent creator decided to stray into some amateurish territory.