Staff Pick: Kyle McAuley

There are novelists, and then there is David Mitchell. His 2004 novel Cloud Atlas spans hundreds of years, from the colonial nineteenth century to a distant post-apocalyptic future, and is told from six different perspectives, each with its own form and style. Each narrator tells the first half of his or her story until the sixth story, which is left whole, after which we get the second halves in reverse chronological order, forming a narrative like a series of nested dolls.

What’s so thrilling about this novel is how complete it feels not in spite but because of this narrative fragmentation. Instead of collapsing under the weight of its own invention, Cloud Atlas breathes and thrives like a collection of living voices (compare the epistolary tale of a destitute British dandy sleeping with his mentor’s wife with the pre-execution testimony of a clone who rebels against the futuristic society that enslaves her). This novel, a persuasive account of how interconnected we, as humans, might be, is one of the most imaginative works of fiction in recent memory.

Bio: Kyle McAuley is an intern at Guernica and a contributing writer at GoodEater.org.