The Bone Clocks

Named one of Granta magazine’s 2003 cohort of Best of Young British Novelists, David Mitchell is considered one of the most influential prose writers of his generation. His work features a wide range of settings and narrators: His first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), takes place in Japan, Hong Kong, China, Mongolia, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Ireland; his third novel, 2004’s Cloud Atlas, begins in New Zealand in the mid-1800s and ends in Hawaii in the distant future.

Mitchell’s novels typically use their vast time spans and settings to discuss the common experiences of radically different people, as well as the impact that individual actions can have on the larger world. This allows Mitchell to raise profound philosophical questions about human action and morality, global cultural shifts, and mankind’s destiny amid the rise of technology and the dominance of political states. The Bone Clocks similarly employs a wide scope to juxtapose Margaret Thatcher’s Britain and the Iraq War of the early 2000s with global literary festivals and a post-Internet future. The political backdrop is especially important for this novel’s themes, since its events run tangentially to the secret war between two factions of immortal beings, the Horologists and the Anchorites.