Unregistered World Book Night book, found in a charity shop in Reigate, Surrey

Six interlinked narratives, told in mirror fashion leading from the nineteenth century through to a post-apocalyptic future, and back again, by degrees, to where you started. Each narrative connects with the others in different ways – with characters who are mentioned in several places, sometimes with a recurring motif of a distinctive birthmark (which I'm not sure works very well). Each of these stories – virtually novellas of their own – are different kinds of writing. We have a historical travel journal, a collection of letters from the 1930s, a conspiracy thriller set in the 1970s, a roughly contemporary memoir, an archived interview set in the reasonably near future, and a kind of oral testimony from a much-altered Earth yet to come. And each narrative is set in a different place too: the South Pacific, Belgium, the fictional US city of Buenas Yerbas, the UK, the country formerly known as South Korea, and post-apocalyptic Hawaii.Pretty ambitious, but Mitchell pulls it off! Each narrative is totally engaging and worth reading in its own right, but the fracturing of the stories, and the subtleties of the threads between them, make a whole which is definitely more than the sum of its parts.

To Newcastle

Received from flambard. Thank you very much. :)

This took me a few pages to really get in to. An interesting book showing how people can be interlinked by the past and the future.

Tried to start a ray off but it has turned in to a RABCK - off to okyrhoe

Arrived in Athens. Thanks so much Diane-Fraser for the RACBK!

After I read it hopefully it can become a ray-it-forward :-)