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The Bone Clocks

Winner of the World Fantasy Award and Longlisted for the Booker and Folio Prizes

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The Bone Clocks

By: David Mitchell
Narrated by: Andrew Wincott, Chris Harper, Jennifer Woodward, Luke Thompson, Nicky Diss, Sandra Duncan
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**Pre-order UTOPIA AVENUE, the spectacular new novel from David Mitchell.**

The dazzling novel from the bestselling author of CLOUD ATLAS.

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014

Run away, one drowsy summer's afternoon, with Holly Sykes: wayward teenager, broken-hearted rebel and unwitting pawn in a titanic, hidden conflict.

Over six decades, the consequences of a moment's impulse unfold, drawing an ordinary woman into a world far beyond her imagining. And as life in the near future turns perilous, the pledge she made to a stranger may become the key to her family's survival . . .

(P) 2020 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd©2014 David Mitchell Fantasy Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Metaphysical & Visionary Science Fiction Heartfelt
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Critic reviews

600 pages of metafictional shenanigans in relentlessly brilliant prose . . . Death is at the heart of this novel. And there lies its depth and darkness, bravely concealed with all the wit and sleight of hand and ventriloquistic verbiage and tale-telling bravura of which Mitchell is a master . . . It's a whopper of a story (Ursula K. Le Guin)
Fantastical, ambitious, bold and exuberant (Viv Groskop, Books of the Year)
A mind-spinning, genre-splicing time-travelling epic
An extraordinary piece of storytelling (Books of the Year)
A return to the exuberance and genre-hopping of Cloud Atlas, and a proper page-turner (Stephanie Merritt, Books of the Year)
Combines fantastic inventiveness with depth and heart (Books of the Year)
One of the most entertaining and thrilling novels I've read in a long time . . . an extraordinary fun house of a novel (Meg Wolitzer)
A ludicrously ambitious, unstoppably clever epic told through a chorus of diverse narrators that is both outrageous in scope and meticulous in execution
Great story, great words, all good
Great fun . . . a tour de force
Mitchell is one of the most electric writers alive. To open a Mitchell book is to set forth on an adventure . . . In his latest novel, The Bone Clocks, Mitchell has spun his most far-flung tale yet . . . Strange and magical
Mind-bendingly ambitious . . . The force of [Mitchell's] storytelling makes The Bone Clocks a joy
Mitchell is a superb storyteller . . . One of the reasons he is such a popular and critically lauded writer is that he combines both the giddy, freewheeling ceaselessness of the pure storyteller with the grounded realism of the humanist. There's something for everyone, traditionalist or postmodernist, realist or fantasist
Magical . . . [it] perfectly illustrates the idea that we're all the heroes of our own lives as well as single cogs in a much larger and more beautiful mechanism
Deeply meaningful . . . The Bone Clocks has everything you might expect to find in a David Mitchell novel: Great characters in settings far-flung over space and time, all tied together by ambitious ideas and gorgeous writing
A sweeping epic . . . that, like Cloud Atlas, spans the ages and tinkers with the hidden gears of human history
The overwhelming impression is of an author at the height of his powers precisely because of a deep and intuitive understanding and curiosity of what it is about to live a life as a human being.
Wild, funny, terrifying . . . a slipstream masterpiece all its own
Unmissable
David Mitchell was my favourite author at college - I raved about The Bone Clocks to everyone I met. . . Mitchell's writing is just as magical for me now as it was back then. (R. F. Kuang)
All stars
Most relevant
I have read this book a few years ago but I could listen to it again and again. What a story: each section has you enthralled. The only downside was the narrator of Marius for me. Everyone else was brilliant.

What a journey!

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I absolutely love this book including its self-referencing and Crispin's breeches of the 4th wall. There is humour to help you through the dark bits and real, flawed characters without compromising on the concepts of good and evil. On the whole, the narration was excellent but I when it came to the part of the story where Mitchell was asking for the greatest degree of suspension of our disbelief, we encountered an unconvincing narrator who could not render the wide range of accents required well enough not to distract. All I can say is hang in there and focus on the tale. You will not regret it.

A fantastic tale

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Would have given it 5 stars if fourth narrator hadn't been quite so jarringly poor at accents.

One of the narrators was awful

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This is an extremely well written story. It’s just that the background story of the characters was so long and I often wondered what the novel was about. It required patience and perseverance to get to the end, which also seemed long winded.

A long read with a thin story

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I could nit-pick about one of the narrators in the latter half of the book, but the story is incredible and pulls you through each minute/page.
Honestly, no spoilers, the end section of the book is a novel in its own right.
Highly recommended.

Oh so good

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