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.

RELEASE NOTES:

To LondonEye - I guess you'll either love it or hate it.

Received from Flambard - many thanks Tony.

Mmmm...after some thought I am still not quite sure of my feelings about this book. There is little doubt that it is very clever and nicely written in a number of very different styles, but did I enjoy it or even understand it? It was not until I was about two thirds of the way though that I finally got my head around the sequence of narratives and was able to get some idea as to what might have been going on. A little too late for me. I suspect that this is another one of those books that is not quite up my street...sorry Tony!

RELEASE NOTES:

This is the third copy I've bought of this book, neither of the other two ever came back to me after I lent them to friends. l enjoyed it so much I wanted to have a copy to keep, I bought it online and now I've to let this one off on its travels for someone else to catch.....typical!