David Mitchell

David Mitchell is best known as the author of the passionately adored literary bestseller Cloud Atlas, a subversive and seductive novel with a messiah-like following (and sales of nearly a million copies worldwide). ‘David Mitchell is a superb storyteller,’ says James Woods in the New Yorker. ‘He can get a narrative rolling along faster than most writers, so that it is filled with its own mobile life. You feel that he can do anything he wants, in a variety of modes, and still convince.’ His fans include the Wachowskis (who made Cloud Atlas into an Oscar-nominated film), Hilary Mantel and Kazuo Ishiguro, who says, ‘reading David for the first time, I was exhilarated’.

His latest novel, The Bone Clocks, has been hailed as his best book since that masterpiece … and it’s equally bizarre, beautiful and challenging.

Fifteen-year-old Holly runs away after a fight with her mother and boyfriend (so far, so normal) and is quickly absorbed by a dangerous cabal of mystics and their enemies, due to her attraction of psychic phenomena. The unsolved mystery of her ‘lost weekend’ will echo through every decade of her life, affecting everyone she loves. This kaleidoscopic novel travels from the Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a Shanghai hotel to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future.

Be taken on a journey by this wildly imaginative novelist, whose historical sweep, mastery of his craft and sheer inventiveness have made him one of the most lauded and loved novelists of our age. In conversation with Suzanne Donisthorpe.