Crispin Hershey, the curmudgeonly author of The Bone Clocks, bears more than a passing resemblance to Timothy Cavendish, the irascible vanity publisher of Cloud Atlas. Some characters from the two books even share the same DNA. The connections between the different parts are more obvious, and despite the unusual structure the whole thing follows a more traditional narrative arc. The Bone Clocks is more accessible than its predecessor, I think. It’s hard not to compare this novel with Cloud Atlas – which I read in the conventional way and which, yes, I do confess to skimming a bit. The sound of a pivotal cataclysmic event is described as like “a town being dropped, and everything in it smashing to bits” after a ride up a mountain, “Holly slides off the chairlift like a gymnast, and I slide off like a sack of hammers” we are told that “the soul is on the edge of what’s visible, like a clear glass marble in a jar of water.” Yet the whole is imbued with a clarity of diction many so-called literary authors fight shy of.

Mitchell’s prose is rich and witty, his dialogue frothy and articulate, his ideas strong and far-seeing. Where The Bone Clocks is concerned, that can only be a good thing. But that’s the great thing about audiobooks – they force to you listen to every single word. Given the audiobook’s total length of nearly 25 hours, it was a mammoth undertaking. I’ve just finished listening to the unabridged Whole Story Audiobooks edition of The Bone Clocks, wonderfully narrated by Jessica Ball, Leon Williams, Colin Mace, Steven Crossley, Laurel Lefkow and Anna Bentinck. However, unlike Cloud Atlas, its story is ultimately about just one person – Holly Sykes, an ordinary Gravesend girl with an extraordinary gift, who finds herself caught up in a cosmic battle between the Horologists and the Anchorites – two factions of rarefied amortals who share the ability to cheat death. Mitchell’s latest novel, The Bone Clocks, is also divided into multiple sections, each with its own narrator. Ever since the publication in 1999 of his first novel, Ghostwritten, author David Mitchell has consistently delighted in playing with narrative structure, such as in his earlier work, Cloud Atlas, in which six centuries-spanning narratives are nested together like matryoshka dolls.

The bone clocks review