Dear Reader

Welcome to BookCrossing and thanks for being a part of World Book Night 2011, the largest book giveaway in history. 1,000,000 specially printed copies of 25 different books changed hands on March 5th 2011 and began their journey from reader to reader. This book is one of them. World Book Night has joined with BookCrossing to help track these books as they travel. You can be a part of that journey by making a comment in the book's journal here on BookCrossing. Your journal entry can say how you got the book, what you thought of it, your plans for it or whatever else you might like to add.

On BookCrossing you may choose to remain anonymous or join (it's free). If you join, you’ll be alerted by e-mail each time someone makes another journal entry for this specific copy of this book (other copies of the book are travelling with their own ID number. Every copy of every book has a unique ID). It’s all confidential (you’re known only by your screen name and no one is ever given your e-mail address) and spam-free.

Thanks in advance for being part of World Book Night and BookCrossing. And happy reading and sharing.

This book is being released via BookCrossing on 5 March 2011 as part of the inaugural World Book Night. With the full support of the Publishers Association, the Booksellers Association, the Independent Publishers Guild, the Reading Agency with libraries, World Book Day and the BBC, one million books will be given away by an army of passionate readers to members of the public across the UK and Ireland.

Read and release!

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released into Flambards care

Many thanks starflash!

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.

On the bookshelf

On the bookshelf