Bone Clocks (Mitchell) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Holly Sykes…attests to this highly cerebral author's ability to create a thoroughly captivating character. Holly's poignant charm and Mr. Mitchell's sheer fluency as a writer help the reader speed through this 600-plus-page novel with pleasure…Mitchell is able to scamper nimbly across decades of Holly's life, using his prodigious gifts as a writer to illuminate the very different chapters of her story. Like a wizard tapping his wand here and there, he turns on the lights in a succession of revealing little dioramas…Mitchell's heavy arsenal of talents is showcased in these pages: his symphonic imagination; his ventriloquist's ability to channel the voices of myriad characters from different time zones and cultures; his intuitive understanding of children and knack for capturing their solemnity and humor; and his ear for language…Holly's emergence from The Bone Clocks as the most memorable and affecting character Mr. Mitchell has yet created is a testament to his skills as an old-fashioned realist, which lurk beneath the razzle-dazzle postmodern surface of his fiction
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


Astonishing.... No one, clearly, has ever told Mitchell that the novel is dead. He writes with a furious intensity and slapped-awake vitality, with a delight in language and all the rabbit holes of experience.... In his sixth novel, he’s brought together the time-capsule density of his eyes-wide-open adventure in traditional realism with the death-defying ambitions of Cloud Atlas until all borders between pubby England and the machinations of the undead begin to blur. . . . He clearly believes not just in words, alternate realities, burps of synchronicity, but in the excitement of thinking about belief and extending its borders without losing the clank of the real.... Not many novelists could take on plausible Aboriginal speech, imagine a world after climate change has ravaged it and wonder whether whales suffer from unrequited love.... Very few [writers] excite the reader about both the visceral world and the visionary one as Mitchell does.
Pico Iyer - New York Times Book Review


A hell of a great read...wild, funny, terrifying...a slipstream masterpiece all its own.... David Mitchell is a genre-bending, time-leaping, world-traveling, puzzle-making, literary magician, and The Bone Clocks is one of his best books.
Esquire
 

A fantastic, perilous journey over continents and decades. Fans of Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas will find this equally ambitious and mind-bending.
Marie Claire
 

Mitchell is back to try to shoot the moon again in a sweeping epic, The Bone Clocks, that, like Cloud Atlas, spans the ages and tinkers with the hidden gears of human history. It reads as if it were dreamed up whole and plotted out in a huge unlined notebook packed with drawings, charts, explosions of scribbles.
GQ


(Starred review.) A globe-trotting, time-bending epic that touches down in, among other places, England, Switzerland, Iraq, and Australia.... Is The Bone Clocks the most ambitious novel ever written, or just the most Mitchell-esque? . . . From gritty realism to far-out fantasy, each section has its own charm and surprises. With its wayward thoughts, chance meetings, and attention to detail, [David] Mitchell’s novel is a thing of beauty.... The less said about the plot the better, but fans of Mitchell’s books will be thrilled.
Publishers Weekly


Curiouser and curiouser...mind-bending, interlocking tales that are reminiscent of a (very) adult version of Alice in Wonderland.... [The Bone Clocks] won’t disappoint (Editor's Pick).
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Another exacting, challenging and deeply rewarding novel from logophile and time-travel master Mitchell. As this long (but not too long) tale opens, we’re in the familiar territory of Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (2006)—Thatcher’s England, that is. A few dozen pages in, and Mitchell has subverted all that.... The next 600 pages...[move] back and forth among places..., times and states of reality.... Speculative, lyrical and unrelentingly dark—trademark Mitchell, in other words.
Kirkus Reviews